Life is a real mixed bag isn’t it?
Regardless of whether you approach it from a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty position, it rarely stays in one emotional place for too long.
Hence we have great ups and downs, ins and outs, steps forward and lurches back, all of it providing rich fodder for music artists, and creative type generally, willing to be brave and take a chance of expressing how they have handled life’s contrariness for better or worse.
The five artists featured have all gone through the good and the bad of life, and lived to tell the tale and more pleasingly for us, sing about it.
Open you heart and listen and maybe, just maybe, you’ll hear something that strikes a chord …
“Home” by Heems feat. Dev Hynes
Ask pretty much any creative person why they write/sing/perform and they will tell you that it’s a powerful way to work through many of the pressing issues in your life, a confessional of sorts that allows the painful and the uncomfortable to be examined in ways that couldn’t happen with an interior monologue.
Heems aka Himanshu Kumar Suri, a Queens, New York City-based rapper who has just released his debut album Eat Pray Thug, is clearly a music artist who subscribes to this approach with his song “Home” authentically addressing the agonising fallout from love most painfully lost.
Featuring talented British musician Devonté “Dev” Hynes aka Blood Orange, the song talks unflinchingly, over raw, stripped back but intensely beautiful music, about the way in which a once intimate, passionate romance can decay into loss and heartbreaking, irreparable distance.
It is, as Pigeons and Planes rightly observes, like listening to Heems open “his chest cavity, [while he] removes his still-aching heart, and drops it on the floor in front of you.”
This is the stuff of life enshrined in art in the most real, personal way, a song that touches you at your core with its truthfulness, poignantly told.
“Weekend Millionaires” by Katelyn Tarver
Another person who realises life isn’t all its cracked up to be all the time, is Los Angeles-based actress (The Secret Life Of The American Teenager, Big Time Rush) and singer Katelyn Tarver whose new song “Weekend Millionaires” addresses the longing inherent in seeing where you’d like to be but not quite being able to get there just yet.
Over synths that merrily but meaningfully percolate under her bright, airy vocals, she sings of being forced to “fake it till you make it”, slogging through the harsh realities of life until you can pretend you’re living the dream on the weekend.
Granted it means trying to talk your way into clubs and being forced to return the clothes you bought on Friday to H & M on the following Monday but for a precious 48 hours we can pretend that the dream is well within our grasp, even if it ultimately all an illusion.
What makes the song so rewarding a listen is that manages to combine intelligent, cleverly-framed lyrics with a bright upbeat melody, the kind of musical yin and yang melding that works so well for many Scandinavian artists.
It reflects the fact that life is both light and dark, good and bad, and that all of us, no matter who we are, are trapped somewhere between reality and a dream, and it does over a tune so addictive you’ll be humming long after you’re once again ensconced back in your cubicle at work.
“Plastic Love” by Peach Kelli Pop
Speaking of combining truth and delusion, and trust me we were, LA garage pop band, Peach Kelli Pop, possessor of one of the best names in music today, have done a fine job of skewering the great gulf between what we long for and what we actually get in their new song “Plastic Love”.
Over a bouncy, growling drums and guitars beat that surges and dives with lyrically gleeful observation and truth, the song takes a long hard look at the way we talk ourselves into believing that the person we’re with, who may be completely wrong for us, is the answer to all our romantic dreams and then some.
It’s not the real thing at all but such is our desire to have it all and have it as perfectly as we imagine it could be, that we manage to fool ourselves into thinking that Cupid has handed us the real thing instead some fantasy knockoff that doesn’t stand up to the harsh light of scrutiny.
Peach Kelli Pop are masters of this kind of music which as Stereogum rather pithily and accurately observes is “their version of the 25-cent gumball that tastes sweet at first but gets tougher after its initial flavor wares off.”
It’s the perfect combination of light and shade, a reminder that sometimes we might be better off not having it all than having a fake manifestation of it, something that won’t do us any real favours in the long run.
“Take Me Up” by Coleman Hell
One man who is definitely a whole lot more positive about life, and rather more cheery than his surname might suggest, is Canadian Coleman Hell, whose song “Take Me Up” is all about celebrating being lifted to a place ” where no one can look down on you”.
An elevating mix of “hip-hop, electronic, and pop music” (Earmilk), the song passionately and foot-tappingly, hand-clappingly waxes lyrical about those sweet spots in life where you have done the whole “darkest before the dawn” thing and emerged out into the breathless possibilities of a new place in your life.
You get the sense that Coleman Hell has journeyed to that dark, tough and painful place and come out the other side, with the song, which bounces along on a wave of keyboard-driven euphoria and more than a hint of cloud-nine-ish brio and joy, and which reflects the Torontorian’s ability to switch genres with consummate ease, an affirmation that life isn’t just darkness and disappointment.
Particularly not when you have close friends willing to go through the hard and happy times, in equal measure, with you.
This is the sort of song you ramp up when you are driving at full speed to somewhere you excitedly can’t wait to be, trembling with the sort of happy anticipation that doesn’t come along often in life but which when it does must be grabbed with both hands and yes committed to a song as giddily happy and knowing as this one.
“Everybody’s In” by Lena Fayre
One artist who has managed to get a pretty good grasp on life in all its complexity in her short time on earth so far is 18 year old Los Angeles native Lena Fayre whose songs, rich with insightful , mature observations about love, life and loss bely her tender age.
She has in fact been releasing music for quite some time now, with her latest effort, “Everybody’s In” is a stripped back, brooding pop affair that lets her emotionally-evocative vocals shine as she sings about passionately wanting to be a lover, and being on the inside with everybody else, getting what “I need”.
You get the sense she is used to being an observer, an outsider who’s never quite with the main group, but someone’s who’s not averse to being with the in-crowd should that happen.
One thing that strikes me most about Fayre, who describes her music as “deconstructed pop”, the outworking of being influenced by the likes of “Grimes, St. Vincent, Junior Boys, and Future Islands, [all of whom] exhibit that kind of multifaceted ‘pop but not pop’ vibe that really strikes me” (Rolling Stone), is her poetic soul best exemplified by her utterly original Facebook page bio:
These are my stories.
Moments, elusive and stagnant,
grown through sound, visuals, echolalia.
Music, the mirror – words of wound and remedy.This is refraction.
Likenesses, images, distortion.
Generation Now, Generation New.
A child thumbing a flower as it pricks a hole.Friction as past and future coalesce.
Nonsense was the word they used.
Combine this kind of lyrical insight with music that is enchantingly gorgeous and arrestingly lovely in every way and you have someone worth listening to over and over again.
NOW THIS IS MUSIC EXTRA EXTRA!
You may recall that Sia, the enigmatic music artist from Australia with a knack for crafting wholly arresting pop melodies such as recent megahit “Chandelier”, is not fond of showing her face in her videos, live performances or on chat shows; essentially anywhere that a famous creative type would ply their wares.
It’s an artistic statement of sorts against the commercialisation of music and celebrity generally as she told Chris Connelly on Nightline.
“I don’t want to be famous, or recognizable. I don’t want to be critiqued about the way that I look on the internet. ”
So to put a face on her performances, she has teamed up with 12 year old dance wunderkind Maddie Ziegler who has shown a preternatural ability to channel the intelligence and raw emotion of Sia’s songs in impressively demonstrative ways.
The latest collaboration between the two artists is for the song “Big Girls Cry” and it is, as you might expect, suitably stunning work.
Artistically-intriguing British artist FKA Twigs, supposedly newly engaged to fellow Brit and thespian Robert Pattinson, has once again impressed with a video that is as audacious and original as the music it complements.
The video for “Glass and Patron”, features, according to Pitchfork, which recently conducted an interview with FKA Twigs, “Twigs giving birth to a bunch of dancers, which gives way to ‘the most epic vogue battle of all time'”.
And finally, two bits of recording news.
Kele Okereke from Bloc Party, in Australia to promote his brilliant solo work, told Australia’s publicly-funded youth radio network triple j that the British band have a new album on the way:
“I guess it’s the first time that I have talked about it but we are making a record at the moment,” the British musician said.
“It’s sounding like nothing that we’ve done before but that’s what everyone always says,” he added humorously.
“We’re at the writing/recording phase. We’ve started recording – I think we have about 18 [song] ideas and we’re going to lay them down properly in the next few months.”
And in news sure to shock nobody, particularly those of us well used to artists announcing they’re retiring and then reversing their decision – hello Cher! – ’80s Norwegian superstars A-ha, best known for their megahit “Take On Me” (1985), have decided they didn’t really want to retire after all, although you can have been forgiven for thinking they meant it in 2010 when they told the world “an ABBA reunion is more likely than us getting back together.”
Apparently not, it seems.
In news featured on The Jakarta Globe, the band’s guitarist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy said “If there is more to say, why wouldn’t we say it?”
Frankly if it’s as catchy as their 2009 song “The Bandstand” from the album Foot of the Mountain, it could be a welcome return indeed.