The “Silly Season”, as it’s fondly known in Australia, is well underway, and with it, the swirl of festive fun that is Christmas.
Now even if you love the most wonderful time of the year, you’ll have to admit that it can be stressful, busy and bereft of any opportunity to sit back and contemplate life in any way, shape or form.
So it’s up to you to create those precious spaces for yourself.
One way to do that is to take a batch of chilled songs, written by thoughtful artists with their fingers on the contrary pulse of life, and let them play and take you to all kinds of blissfully ruminative places.
It may not help you find that gift you need for fussy Aunt Jean but you will feel better afterwards, with all the idea of all that falala-ing and decking of halls feeling far less onerous than it once did.
“Fear of the Water” by SYML
There’s a stark, arresting, achingly-melancholic quality to “Fear of the Water” from Barcelona frontman Brian Fennell who records under the name SYML in his recording studio in Issaquah, WA outside Seattle.
Reflecting, says Fennell, “the complex feelings that come from unknown lineage” – the artist discovered he is descended from Welsh forebears, a discovery that led him to adopt SYML, meaning “simple” in Welsh as his recording name – this song and others such as “Where’s My Love” which is the name of his January/February 2018 tour, are evocative explorations into what it feels to grapple with dislocation and a sense of being unmoored.
The soft, gently-percussive melody is given intensely-exquisite amplification by Fennell’s resonant voice which seems to encompass all the pain, longing, insight and thoughfulness in the world.
“Fear of the Water” cuts to the bone but in the most reassuring of ways – yes there are moments when we feel utterly adrift but there are places, and most importantly, people, who can make us feel solidly tethered again, with the song a glitteringly lovely invocation to choose closeness and belonging over a lost sense of being.
“Somewhere Else” by JW Ridley
One of the loveliest things about slow, more contemplative songs is the rare-in-this-hyperactive-digital-age chance they give you to completely lose yourself in a gently swirling three minute idyll of melody and lyric.
Londoner JW Ridley, one-time arts school graduate and lately purveyor of sublimely ruminative pop, is a master of creating these blissfully escapist moments, catching you up in a reverie of langorous thought that is good for the soul.
And as We Are: The Guard notes, good for the ears as well:
“‘Somewhere Else’ a dreamy, otherworldly swirl of 80s-indebted post-punk, with crisp electronic drums meeting guitars steeped in canyons of reverb, all the while Ridley’s spacey, detached vocals preside over the whole thing like some washed-out Instagram filter.”
“Maybe I Won’t” by Liyv
Styling herself as an artist who “songs for sad people who like bright colors”, Oregonian Liyv is not a woman to be trifled with.
Her song “Maybe I Won’t”, from her EP “It Me” is all about dispeling woefully incorrect expectations of herself while simultaneously disabusing someone who has made all kinds of wild assumption, again erroneously, about who she is and what she’ll do.
It’s a lyrical truthful song wrapped in a superlatively lush bed of gorgeous slow-moving pop that together is a finely thought-out and articulated shakedown of someone who hasn’t really thought things through.
Home truths aren’t always easy to handle but delivered this beautifully they echo Mary Poppins sage advice about the way a spoonful of sugar can make the medicine go down.
“Fingers” by Hundred Waters
First things first, Nicole Minglis, lead singer of band Hundred Waters is WAAAAY too comfortable having creepy crawlies all over her body.
It’s a brave artistic statement yes, and pulled off with suitably-composed aplomb but makes my skin crawl (12,000 different ways; yep that’s how many creatures were on her.)
The song, “Fingers” is everything luxuriously and airily lush, drawing on “the sound of muted pianos and jazz-indebted rhythms” (We Are: The Guard) that artfully discusses, with Minglis’s ethereally rustic voice articulating it with breathtakingly lovely emotional resonance, the day-to-day contrariness and inconsistencies of loving someone else.
It’s a magnificently beautiful song that immerses you completely in its ruminative, gracious wonder, letting you muse on the nature of love in a way that doesn’t necessarily all the answers (do they even exist to find, I wonder?) but give you ample to try and find them.
“Jailbird” by SHELLS
Capturimg dark lyrical matter in a gloriously beautifully fey melody is a thing of incredibly skill and artistry.
But SHELLS, the stage name of British singer-songwriter Sarah Lillie Sheldrake, manages it with ease, folding in a seismic decision to leave a toxic relationship into a song that We Are: The Guard observes marries “[SHELL’s] billowing voice meeting synthesizer droplets and organic rhythms”.
The song is ineffably lovely but comes with some lyrical barbs in its glossily delivered melody:
“I’m burning down the walls to light up the front door/Tearing down the holes to see the light once more/Jailbird, not gonna be a jailbird anymore.”
It’s serious stuff but delivered with such gently-articulated passion and voice that you are given time to come to appreciate what a momentous step forward this is for the young woman in the song.
NOW THIS IS MUSIC EXTRA EXTRA!
Who are the most fun family you know?
The Addams Family of course and in this fantastic 2015 video by filmmaker Gabriel Magallon, the spookiest, coolest family around get down to the Ramones’ iconic song “Blitzkrieg Bop”.
(Source: Laughing Squid)