Julia-Sophie - 'y?'

By Phillipe Roberts

If you’re not a member of the COVID truther brigade tainting the air with hoax logic, space–physical, mental, and emotional–has been incredibly hard to find during lockdown. You’ve picked up at least trace amounts of social anxiety that no amount of brain-picking nasal swabs can totally soothe, and the first thing you’ll notice about anyone on the street is the presence or absence of a mask. Distance is safety. Hurry back to the nervous bubble and scrub off the outside.

Enter the microverse of y?, the debut EP from UK singer/producer Julia-Sophie and your personal escape hatch into endless open space. Clocking in at a bite-sized fourteen minutes, y? dives deep in search of emotional truths, unraveling and savoring each feeling with spellbinding patience. Soothing without neglecting the complex, violent honesty that comes with setting yourself free, these tunes breathe life into solitude. Stuck inside or masking up, this is a moment to let your guard down.

Though it’s destined to find its way into the vast chillscape that dominates the playlist world, y? glides to the head of the pack in its surgical use of textured sound to support its blistering lyrical excavations. Opener “breathe” expands and contracts like a lung, flowing from tender verses that cling tightly to a distorted drum rattle before erupting into a cavernous–“with your heart in my hands/I feel safe.” Bits of Julia-Sophie’s voice get lost in space. A sliver of desire–“kiss me”–slips into a brief moment of stillness. “x0x” punches the hardest of any track here. Heartbreaking self-doubt blooms from a flurry of beats that evolve continuously over the track, pressing you forward as the words “nobody wants me here” swirl overhead and a garbled French transmission overwhelms the senses. It’s a panic attack in real time, and you’re strapped in.

After the glittering respite of the interlude “i told you everything”, Julia-Sophie unveils “i left you”, the slow-burning pop gem that should become her calling card. “I try to buy time to be okay tomorrow/ to look inside my mind” hits unreasonably hard, pressed to the front of the mix and decorated only by the nervous ticking of synthesizer blips. Blurry passion is discarded with the ruthless admission “I don’t feel alive enough to call you.” Rather than present a mere snapshot of uncertainty, a portrait of loneliness or disillusionment, “i left you” drags you through all the hope, expectation, and self-annoyance that comes with stunted desire. Without a clear cut victory or loss, it makes up its own mind. Julia-Sophie’s emergence from her day job on the frontlines of synthpop trio Candy Says feels perfectly timed to create more than a space for therapeutic dreaming; y?’s soft curiosity is a gentle reminder to go beyond the pain of self-discovery and explore your own hidden worlds. What emotional spaces are you neglecting? What barriers are you building against the gathering storm of your own feelings? What better time than now to listen deeply? 

REVIEW: Gorgeous Bully - Great Blue

Kelly Kirwan

Gorgeous Bully have carved out a place for themselves in the realm of minimalist bedroom pop by giving their sound a razor-sharp edge. The Manchester four-piece have returned with a new LP, great blue, full of bustling melodies and a pinch of grit on each of its twelve tracks. They tend to keep their songs brief—the longest clock in at just over three minutes—making for an album that never drags despite its generally laid-back aesthetic.

great blue's title track is one of its slower, more meditative songs. True to its name, it conjures a calming, expansive ambiance reminiscent of the sea. The vocals are soft, delivered in a gentle cadence that weaves between a chorus of oohs, which add to its tranquil aura. Plucked guitar strings and tangy reverb billow out like soft ripples on the water’s surface.

Then there’s "can’t explain," which comes in just shy of the two-minute mark. It's a quick hit of nigh-monotone, chant-like vocals, like a little dose of reluctance to unpack more complicated emotions. Between punctuated percussion we hear the exasperated lyrics, “I was feeling strange that evening / Think it’s something I can’t explain … You didn’t get it / I said forget it / It’s just something I can’t explain.”

On "health," the drums are prominently featured, and rich guitars play a driving riff in the background. The lyrics “You take it out on yourself … It’s no good for your health” are a mainstay of the track, a mantra to avoid becoming your own worst enemy. It’s a loose, sunny melody offset by even-keeled vocals, exemplifying the balancing act that is Gorgeous Bully's style. great blue is expansive, with a certain fluidity between their tracks that makes each snippet meld into a seamless whole. It’s music that goes down smooth but still has a spark, and it’s worth diving into.

REVIEW: Arrows of Love - PRODUCT

Will Shenton

It's probably an understatement to say that London five-piece Arrows of Love's latest record, PRODUCT, opens on an ominous note. Embracing its unvarnished title, "Theme Tune To A Japanese B-Movie Horror" features a single, heavily distorted guitar that winds its way through unresolved dissonance before fading slowly into a screeching echo. It's a simple but effective way to set the tone of the album, serving as a sort of airlock between our world and the cacophonous, anarchic one we're about to enter.

Like all great post-punk, grunge, and metal (the three genres from which Arrows of Love most heavily draw), PRODUCT is loud. With the exception of a few tracks that quiet things down for the sake of pacing or building atmosphere, shrieking distortion and propulsive drums comprise the album's backbone. The result is an aesthetic that casts our world in a foreboding pallor, as if malicious forces conspire and lurk around every corner—perhaps most literally on "Signal," as the lyrics describe fighting off a monster with a dwindling supply of bullets.

At times dark and sludgy ("Beast," "Come With Me"), and at others melancholy and introspective ("Desire," "Parts That Make the (W)hole"), PRODUCT maintains an unrepentant catharsis throughout. Even the most downtempo tracks (a decidedly relative classification) build to explosive climaxes, seemingly framing the album's subtitle, Your Soundtrack To The Impending Societal Collapse, as something to be resisted with indignant rage.

It's that refusal to sit back and accept the hand you're dealt that really defines Arrows of Love's attitude. Their blunt, often spoken-word lyrical delivery is approachable and candid, eschewing frills and melodies in favor of visceral urgency. It's easy to imagine the band standing on their table in a pub, delivering half-shouted polemics against the status quo to a room full of fed-up regulars.

One of the standout tracks on PRODUCT, "Beast," embodies this more directly than the rest of the album. Something of a thesis in its own right, the breakdown before the final, frenzied chorus indicts us for our passivity in the face of injustice:

"We've seen the shit that's going on out there / It's fucked! / So be depressed, you've every right to be / It would not be normal if you weren't / But the question is / If it's gonna knock you down / Are you just gonna lie there / Or are you gonna get up and throw some stones?"

After spending the better part of an hour with Arrows of Love, that should be an easy one.

REVIEW: Moderate Rebels - Proxy

Kelly Kirwan

Moderate Rebels' name is something of an oxymoron, suggesting a nonchalant sort of insurgency against the norm. The London-based four-piece operate under the doctrine of simplicity, the negative space created by silences and curt sentences easily more intriguing than any tell-all. Their latest EP, Proxy, is rife with monotonous, chant-like choruses and a chugging percussion set alongside hypnotic, sweeping guitar riffs. Their lyrics are minimal and often repetitive, feeling like spoken word offered up in an underground bar, or a rallying call to lead a lethargic, tight-lipped march on the mainstream.

The opener, "Liberate," fits with the subcultural aesthetic they’ve adopted, the vocals taking on an almost automated feel: “See the deserts inside and outside / Made of glass / Hit you on the blindside / In your face … The dead and the living / We liberate.” The twangy guitars and backing chorus of ahs paint the melody in a warm hue that stands in counterpoint to the lead vocals' cooler delivery, their pitch unaffected until the line “We liberate” grows into a hypnotic command.

Then there’s the quickly-paced "Good For Business," which has a fairly sunny beat considering the morbid opening line, “Spreading and selling death every day / Don’t tell me there’s another way … And it’s good for business.” The song’s title (true to Moderate Rebels’ style) serves as the track’s thesis statement, frequently reiterated and wriggling into our heads to take hold, an undeniable earworm. The word "business" becomes increasingly elongated, its final consonants hissing over the clanging melody, as biting descriptions of the market bring the song to a petering close, “Ever-increasing business / Staggering amounts of business / Visionary new business.” 

Moderate Rebels' sound feels like a natural descendant of krautrock, experimental with swirls of punk and traces of the psychedelic, and their stylish approach makes for a unique and a refreshing listen. With the longest track stretching just over three minutes, Proxy is a sparse but formidable EP that’ll quickly burrow its way into your head.

REVIEW: Faye Meana - Nothing's the Same

Kelly Kirwan

Faye Meana. The name is melodic, with a half-rhyme hiding in its syllables, the two words rolling off the tongue with a certain easy lyricism. More often than not, a name is just a name (cue the obligatory Shakespeare reference), but in this instance it hits the mark in capturing the artist it belongs to.

Faye Meana is an up-and-coming, London-based songstress whose soulful croon simultaneously prompts heart pangs and a compulsive sashay to her R&B melodies. Earlier this year she released her four-track EP, Nothing's the Same, which stands as a poignant piece of work, diving into the inner turmoil and glints of hope that so often become entwined in relationships (particularly ones that were never able to find steady ground).

The song "Patience" shuffles with a light chime of cymbals, as deep notes bleed across the melody, played in rich, broad, vibrant strokes. Faye Meana’s voice flies into a head-turning soprano, eventually leveling out into a smooth pitch, as if she were merely murmuring her passing thoughts: “Wishin’ that you would take me home tonight, home tonight / Home tonight, with you / Wishin’ that you would make me yours tonight / Yours tonight, maybe.” The chorus drifts around us, its repeated phrases lulling us into the same craving for human connection. “Spoke for a while then I gave you my number / Texted a bit but then it faded out again,” she recalls, her voice moving from a subdued, confidential tone to high, heartsick notes.

Then there’s "Move On," with its pronounced, idiophonic percussion keeping the pace amidst a gleaming melody. Faye Meana’s voice is always smooth as satin, but it’s also impassioned, and it delivers moments of realization that are bit coarser then what you might first expect. “Now we have become those people that we didn’t want to be / And we’ll have to do our best to get back where we want to be … Did you ever wish we stop this shit and move on?” The song then fades into a conversation among a group of people, speaking of life’s hurdles with a blend of humor and resilience, reminiscent of Lauryn Hill’s finish for her 1998 smash "Doo-Wop."

In all, Nothing’s the Same is an album that touches on heartbreak without drowning in it. The melodies are mesmerizing, the grooves easy to slip into, and the lyrics contemplative. Faye Meana's latest is well worth your time.