YONAH – Land of Honey
You’re probably better off not knowing. Maybe it’s better if your parents obsess about sheltering you to the point where they allow you no access to modern music, movies, or books. Perhaps that will save you some unwanted heartache along the way.
Who out of all the millions of people who have fallen in love with rock n’ roll has been let down by it? Who out of all the millions who were made to dream by these incredible sounds and the stories that accompany them hasn’t felt disappointed when they were forced to wake, just like YONAH has?
The music world’s a funny old place. Sure, it’s made up of crusty execs, bitter producers and extraordinary professionals who wake up at the crack of dawn each morning. It’s also made up of people who just had a little too much to dream, and in a week where we lost Sly Stone, it’s best that we remember that.
YONAH’s “Land of Honey” is an indie-rock perspective on this mythical world of creative geniuses and chemically unbalanced casualties. What gives the lyrics a particular bite is that they’re penned by a 20-something, not a grizzled vet. What makes the song easy to remember is the way that each vocal lyric and vocal line floats so smoothly. Yonah has seen what keeps the machine’s flames burning, and there’s no unseeing it now.
HYUKOH x Sunset RollerCoaster – Do Nothing
Pop music, generally, works because of a simple reason – everybody knows what to expect from it. This is a language that is easy to share because everybody speaks it. The vast majority of people, regardless of their life experience and their place in society, know, at least, a few dozen pop songs by heart. All of them know how pop songs should work, where choruses fit, what job a verse part needs to do etc.
But because of the power of expectation, slightly circumventing the rules can be a very powerful decision. The rule tends to be that the pop stars who simply live up to the genre’s design achieve success for a short period of time, but those who are able to colour just outside the lines are the ones who create cult-like followings.
HYUKOH x Sunset RollerCoaster’s “Do Nothing” is a marvellously unusual concept for a very friendly-sounding pop song. And that’s the reason why this could easily become the obsession of a large number of listeners, many of them Westerners. A cheeky song about giving in to laziness and the consequences this has, HYUKOH & Sunset RollerCoaster create a chilled-out, almost tropical sound, peppered with clever lyrics and vocal melodies.
