Music is never a fixed thing.
Even after a song makes its way out to an eager public, the artist themselves can change, play with it, in the studio or in concert, or another artist entirely can cover it, offering their own interpretation of the song.
But that is nature of creativity – if you’re open to it, it’s a world of endless possibilities, experimentation and change, offering some exciting, arrestingly transfixing songs as a result.
The five artists featured all subscribe to a willingness to push the boundaries and see where it takes them, resulting in singularly beautiful music that you can’t help but lose yourself in for as long as your heart desires.
“The Words” by Freedom Fry
It’s all too easy as a creative person to settle into establishing patterns of giving form to your ideas; not because you’ve grown lazy or disinterested, more that you discover what you love and are good at and keep creating the same kind of art out of pure pleasure and devotion.
But as folk/pop duo Freedom Fry, composed of transatlantic married couple Marie Seyrat and Bruce Driscoll (she is French, he is American) demonstrate, pushing beyond the usual and trying something extraordinary can deliver some impressively beautiful results.
Their song “The Words” recalls their established folk/pop leanings but throws some enticing extra musical ingredients into the mix as Free Bike Valet notes:
“A self-described “hybrid song,” the infectious track pivots between psychedelic hauntings and folk pop over consistent disco beats.”
It’s an immeasurably lovely song that proves the power of pushing outside your usual boundaries, impressively listenable though they are, and seeing what happens.
“Come Back From It” by Your Friend
Your Friend, the musical moniker of Taryn Blake Miller, on the other hand is testament to never giving up on a particular piece of creativity.
In this case, it’s a song the artist created for the demoing process for her new album Gumption which didn’t quite work in its initial form. But pieces of that discarded song came to form the core of “Come Back From It” in a process described on Domino.
“The whirling, dark, drum loop (arguably the backbone) and the crackling drone were the only original pieces of audio from the demo. Producer Nicolas Vernhes encouraged that there was something about the lurching nature of those elements that was worth pursuing. Miller already had a sense of verses, but there wasn’t a ‘relief,’ as Vernhes said, when referring to a chorus. Vernhes sat her in the control room of Rare Book Room in Brooklyn and played Lou Reed’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes,” with the both of them in silence, then said, “You have thirty minutes, go write a chorus.’ After the structure was formed, Miller took on the task of creating several, separate loops for each chord in the entire song, and Vernhes collaging them and achieving an overall cinematic type of texture.”
Again a marvellous song resulted from being willing to start all over again in effect with “Come Back Fro,m It”, a hauntingly engrossing pop song that lopes along with a pleasingly melodic languid sensibility, anchored by Miller’s highly evocative voice.
It is demonstrates that you should never the creative baby out with the bathwater, and that something magnificent can rise from the ashes of a song that didn’t quite make it on the first go through.
“No One’s Going to Heaven” by The Hour
“No One’s Going to Heaven” has a killer spoken word intro, all brooding menace and yet playful into the bargain.
It ushers in a song that pounds and snarls its way into existence before segueing into a tasty piece of guitar pop that mixes blues-swagger with some beautifully-executed plaintive vocals.
Austin, Texas-based The Hour, who humorously describe their record label status on their Facebook page as “Currently Accepting Applications”, have a knack for crafting eminently listenable music that manages to be manifestly artistic and yet brilliantly accessible at once.
As a debut track, and it is, it’s one hell of a memorable, transfixing entrance.
“Take Me Home” by Shylde
There is an ambient beauty to the music of Shylde, who hails from the Sweden, that utterly immerses you in a musically transportive state from the get go.
“Take Me Home” is a dreamy piece of epic lo-fi electronica, Shylde’s voice (which Acid Stag rightly describes as sounding “like Antony Hegarty mixed with a good dose of Jeff Buckley”) reaching impossibly beautiful levels in the chorus which immediately leaves you feeling as if reality has disappeared around you, leaving you in a magical altogether unexpected place.
This is the music of escape, of leaving the ordinary pell-mell world and drifting off into dreamland and the sort of places your mind goes to when the deadlines, the cacophony of the urgent and must-be-done leaves you in piece for a second.
It’s an impressively immersive, staggeringly beautiful follow-up to his equally evocative first single “Fickle” and heralds an arresting new talent in the offing.
“Folders” by RYAN Playground
RYAN Playground, based in Montreal, is one talented individual, listing herself on Facebook as a “producer / singer /dj”, a mix of talent that is fully in evidence on “Folders”, a single from the artist’s new album elle.
The song is all blissfully distorted melodies, trippy production and vocals that waft with muscular beauty back and forth in this seductively slow-jam song.
Produced by Ryan Hemsworth, an artist of considerable talent himself, “Folders” is a delightfully left-of-centre effort, reflecting the experimentation and willingness to push the envelope that characterises so much of the music coming forth from Hemsworth’s Secret Songs label.
And it’s a damn beautiful piece of music into the bargain.
NOW THIS IS MUSIC EXTRA EXTRA!
Elizabeth Rose is an enormously talented Australian music artist with a gift for crafting instantly memorable, beguiling pop songs.
At the forefront of what she terms “future pop”, it makes sense that she’d team with Google Australia to create an interactive clip where you can make her laugh, make her cry or play her life a puppet, all of which the artist says works well because the song “Playing With Fire” is “quite playful in itself.”
For more info on this remarkably cool new clip, check out Mashable.
http://www.bitcandy.com/music/top-indie-songs-week-6-2016 [freedom fry + Your Friend + The Hour + Shylde]
http://pigeonsandplanes.com/2016/02/ryan-playground-folders-hemsworth/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=P%26P%20-%20Daily%202016-02-15&utm_term=Daily