We all want to be moved, to feel something that matters don’t we?
In our hustle-and-bustle-filled, all too easily distracted by digital baubles-and-trinkets 21st century world, it’s all too easy to miss the fact that while we’re taking in a lot, we’re not necessarily really hearing it, or feeling it.
It skips over us all too easily making barely a mark, another brief flickering entry in a tsunami of experiences and knowledge with no real impact being made.
So stop for a second, and let these five artists remind you what it is to set a spell, take the world in, think about it and really FEEL it, to appreciate what being alive, both the good and the bad and the banal in-between, is all about.
“Heavy Shoulders” by TRACE
The stripped back airy vocals wafting, redolent with emotion, over punchy, staccato beats announce “Heavy Shoulders” by TRACE as a statement by an artist with a strong sense of their own artistic identity.
A damn fine, highly-listenable, engrossingly emotive statement, at that.
The Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter, while possessing, as Hillydilly notes “whiffs of stars like BANKS and Sylvan Esso in her lyrics and delivery”, is very much her own creation, a wholly individual artist in a world where it’s all too easy to jump on the latest musical bandwagon.
But “Heavy Shoulders” isn’t simply the sound of one person going out to stake her own piece of real estate in the crowded world of popular music.
Rather, it’s the lead statement of someone who not only knows how she wants to sound but what she wants to say, a powerful, highly unique sensibility that can’t help but win you over.
“This song is simply about knowing better but not wanting to be better. And how the routine of life and it’s repetition can make you feel lost in what was once comforting and familiar.” (TRACE)
“Clenched Teeth” by Okay Kaya
Hailing from Norway, but now quite happily ensconced in the musically-rich creative atmosphere of NYC, Okay Kaya has crafted a delicately-beautiful song with some real emotional heft.
“Clenched Teeth”, as she told Dazed Digital, is all about “The song is just about laying next to someone and drifting off into a lucid dream where they’re finally able to confess everything to you through clenched teeth.”
So a reluctant confessional if you will, set to music that is at once ethereally fey but also robustly meaningful, matching the ruminative, mind-wandering nature of the lyrics to a tee.
Throw in Okay Kaya’s beautifully far off but deeply emotive vocals, that recall artists like Leona Naess, and you have a song, a follow-up to her arresting debut, “Damn, Gravity”, that can’t help but move you with its raw, delicately lovely authenticity.
“Callaway (ft. Dana Williams)” by Swim Good
Framed by what Acid Stag rather winningly call the “pillow-soft vocals of Los Angeles singer-songwriter Dana Williams who appeared on TV talent show Rising Star, “Callaway” by Canada’s Swim Good is a breath of atmospheric air, rich with regret and thankfulness.
The electronic project of Jon Lawless, a man of great, diverse always-intriguing musical output, Swim Good has delivered up a track that envelops you in music and lyrics so thoughtfully arrived at that stay unmoved and uninvolved isn’t really an option.
You don’t so much listen to the song as get subsumed into it, a wholly good thing given the way so much pop music simply skitters straight off the top of you, forgotten by the next opening intro of the next breathlessly-heralded song.
Unless your ears are filled-in, and your heart is made of concrete, there’s very little chance you’ll forget “Callaway”, and its exquisitely moving melody, vocals and lyrics, anytime soon.
“Lose My Mind” by Wales
“Lose My Mind” announces itself with a suitably ambient introduction that gives way to Wales’ aka Samuel Aaron Bennett’s airy vocals and a haunting mid-tempo melody that drifts along on a gorgeous sea of deeply-felt emotions.
This is music that can’t help but affect you in a profound way as The Music Ninja sagely notes:
“‘Lose My Mind’ will undeniably make you want to grab your keys, roll down your car windows, and drive off toward a destination-less place of pure euphoria. Let your skin feel the breeze while you open up your senses to the wonders of Wales and his emotive resonance. Make sure to grab a sweater because it might get a little chilly deep inside your mind.”
The song is that powerful, a reminder that you should never underestimate the motivational power of what may at first appear to be simply a captivatingly-beautiful, winsomely sweet song, but which draws you in, gets pleasingly under your skin, and yes, makes you feel, think and ponder in ways we often don’t get a chance to do.
“Top to Toe” by Honne
Talking about feeling something, and yes we were, there is nothing more melancholically entrancing than hearing someone say “I’m falling top to toe, falling in love…but my heart is not there.”
So close to the dream of the deepest of human connections but so frustratingly far, staring at feels like an impossible to cross to void.
Sounds like the sort of emotional territory you’d want to avoid like the plague, but in the hands of East London-duo and their heart-splittingly sad, divinely-beautiful song “Top to Toe”, you want to be there, understand it, know it, own to its existence, painful though it might be in many ways.
Reflecting in every note and lyric the meaning of the band’s Japanese-derived name, which speaks of the often-distressing disconnect between a person’s actual feelings and their desires, the song is quite rightly described by Howl and Echoes as “an enchantingly gorgeous song”.
NOW THIS IS MUSIC EXTRA EXTRA!
Want a mash-up of dance scenes from 100 movies with “Uptown Funk”, a song by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars that has well and truly captured everyone’s dance-loving hearts?
Well of course you do, and the people behind YouTube channel What’s the Mashup? are just the ones to give it to you.
Enjoy, and yes DANCE!