SOPHIE makes such writhing and electrified music, and is totally under-appreciated by pretty much everyone I know, which makes this an excellent opportunity to pour out all the pieces of moments that this music has erupting in my head. Everything SOPHIE produces is a cool and weird mix of ultra-peppy bouncy vocals, popping over hyper-crisp bleeps that sparkle and flare, but on top of that, at times there are tracks that go darker and start to rumble with a low rising aggression, like heavy clouds rolling in. It‘s probably easy to declare SOPHIE an amalgam of teenage enthusiasm, there is definitely something distinctly fresh about the music, possibly basking in a sort of sun-drenched innocence, but I really feel like there’s so much more to it than that, I think it’s youth, but shot through with adrenaline, turning the velocity of living and the experience of being young right up, with a foot hard down on the accelerator. The vocals are all these statements of carefree recollection, but among that, there’s something not quite real, as though all this is just a performance or recording of an idealistic vision of how things ought to be, or might have once been, and it rolls over me like a videogame enactment of nostalgia. I feel a pull to the idea that underlying all this music is a fast-paced sense of finality, that everything will soon be forgotten, and that these tracks capture brief scenes of joy and honesty that have already passed us by, and there’s something decadent about the melancholy of that. I hear these tracks like a loop of lost memories, trapped automated in an electronic vault somewhere, playing round and round on repeat to an empty world. I wanted to try and pin down exactly how SOPHIE’s music engages my consciousness, and to have free reign to indulge all my concepts of what this music is for me. To make it more focused, I’ve chosen three particular tracks as examples to respond to.
To begin with I’ve selected ‘MSMSMSM’.
This one’s fully agitated and has a glaring menace colouring its sinister bass, the high pitch punchiness of the core sounds is the kind of thing that could soundtrack a game of dangerous warehouse hide and seek. It also sounds like a cyborg stag weekend, a squad of marauding droids, with all their glistening chrome and titanium polished to perfection, every joint and LED slathered in the solvent stench of high grade oil, I can visualise marching robots synchronised in their mechanised sexuality. The metallic drums in this song reverberate like a rubber band ball pinging around the inside of my skull, bringing a little buzz to my bone cavities. I like how it’s harsh and jumpy at the same time and it’s adolescent, with an attention deficit disorder sweetness, cute then mean, starting to hold your hand a little bit tighter, like things could go bad, but there’s something thrilling about that.
There’s a short uplifting melodic part in the middle of the track, but it feels like self-delusion, the attempt to convince yourself you’re having fun on your own at the party where you vaguely know two people, but in reality you’re edging closer and closer into a corner and wondering whether you could get away with pulling a blanket over you and pretending to be a beanbag for the rest of the night. You can dance to this track for sure, but it also feels a bit like you could beat yourself up to it as well.
Next up, I want to focus on ‘Lemonade’.
This rattles into my head as the music that would be playing in a sleep-walk of late summer, like lying all day beside a lover in a field back where the old fairground used to be, staring up at the pylons and drinking from a dosed hipflask, getting warm and drowsy with each big gulp, and letting my eyes sink closed, lurching awake to find it’s three weeks later and trying to roll over on the scorched grass but my skin’s welded itself to the earth and giant mutant field mice are nibbling at my ribcage beneath a shredded T shirt, and I‘m alone except the rodents, and the sky’s pink and laughing and my brain feels like it’s melting out my ears, and the air smells like the last day of everything, and my jaw’s locked in a continuous grin even though the sun’s bleached my corneas. By all of which I mean, this track feels all bright and high and glowing like July, the vocals sound so happy, as though I just made a connection with someone, and the minute I felt it they’ve already gone, there’s a promise of something wonderful, and then later, as the sun goes down, you realise all you had was lemonade, if you even had that.
‘Just Like We Never Said Goodbye’ is the last track I’m going to mention.
It is a beautiful song, it’s a story, starting keen and honest, young lovers reconnecting, but because these things in my head tend to spin out until they find some darkness, I’ve started to consider this song as the euphoria of a death dream, stretching on into a purgatorial groundhog day of endless reunion. Maybe it’s the lack of conventional drums, which is unexpected and interesting, that makes the song carry a sadness, like a faded portrait of a computer to human relationship, a techno-romance reaching its unavoidable end with the human body as a frail and failing form, a bundle of collated cancers, organ failure, coma, one last logical act of affection from an adoring operating system shutting down the life support, to let the body go. In the background of this song, there’s a sound of a digital trickle, like a running tap, and it brings a quiet subtle urgency to the whole track, like time’s dripping away. It’s seems to me a tender song, but it also strikes me as being retrospect rather than looking towards any actual future, I can see it as a tribute to youth and connection, timelessness and the endurance of love, but it’s tinged with the sense that there is a goodbye, and it’s inevitable, and that someone always leaves first. This one is also so catchy, it rises and rises and although it never explodes in the way it keeps teasing that it’s going to, it reaches the kind of peak that pulls you all the way up with it, so that when the vocals gather pace right at the end, I’m almost begging for them to stay a little longer, just as all the lights go out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment