Not an attempted revival of the sea shanty trend but rather some lovely folk-pop!
Hannah Jocelyn: I stumbled upon Gigi Perez in 2022 and she blew me away with her voice, which cut through the high-budget Manny Marroquin mixes she got at the time. Perez’s contralto is obviously indebted to Jeff Buckley and more modern contemporaries like Lucy Dacus and Gordi, but her recent songs have her singing from a more nasal, high-pitched register that complements the more direct lyrics. From the first few seconds, that risk pays off: no better way to open a sailor song than sounding like a siren! The similar melody in the choruses and verses shouldn’t work, but make for an incredibly easy sing-along, like a campfire song lovesick lesbians. Some have compared this to other 2010s indie folk, but if there’s a 2010s indie folk song with a line as feral and fanfic-ready as “She took my fingers to her mouth/the kind of thing that makes you proud/that nothing else ever worked out”, I’d love to hear it. No, Hozier doesn’t count.
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Mark Sinker: For other uses, see Anne Hathaway (disambiguation).
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Ian Mathers: I’m a big fan of voice-and-acoustic-guitar production where they just whack a mess of effects on there until the whole thing attains a pleasing mass; on headphones my whole brain feels like it’s reverberating to some divine frequency. I’m especially fond of what the saxophone adds here (including at the beginning) and how intense and specific most of the lyrics are; “the kind of thing that makes you proud that nothing else had ever worked out, worked out” is a haymaker.
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Jel Bugle: Once upon a time I might have liked this kind of thing. It’s a bit generic really — shimmery acoustic shoegaze, I’d probably like it more if it were in a different language, as I quite like Japanese/Brazilian shoegaze stuff. I liked the trumpet-ity bit at the end, so a bonus point for that!
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Moving the 2010s nostalgia doomsday clock 5 seconds closer to midnight.
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Alfred Soto: I’ve never tasted a sailor but I’ve checked one out! Gigi Perez’s intensity suggests they’re a lot of fun — she thinks of sailors when her lover sticks Perez’s fingers in her mouth. The cumulative intensity complements the melodic sameness. By the time it’s over it’s as if we peeked into a friend hooking up.
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Taylor Alatorre: “Humans are endlessly fascinating,” he mumbles to himself while scrolling idly through the YouTube comments.
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Nortey Dowuona: Adoration, obsession, projection; those are not love. They fade, or worsen, then are shorn once the things that inflamed them have withered away. Most of us live in relationships built on one or two or even all three, then when it fades we blame them for not being who we wanted them to be instead of accepting them. The vulnerable struggle to find those they can trust, the manipulative choose to lure them in then condemn them from saving them from themselves. But what does a random stranger on the internet know about love? I do know I wish for this, despite doing everything in my power to prevent anyone from choosing me. I can relate to having nobody to love you with their chest, until they’re gone and you realize you let those bonds fray and despoil, now weak and thin, little worms eating through the soil that connected us. I desire love, I crave it, yet I do nothing to find it, nurture it, or even feed it other than the faintest, lightest touches. I am no sailor, simply a landlubber with chlorine pool sea legs who can’t bring himself to crawl atop the waves through the muck to find someone who would want me to be a part of their life. I know there are, but that’s different from cultivating them. I write about my personal desire and fear of love since the lyrics in this song firmly and gently shut me out — it’s not meant for me, someone will appreciate this more. Unfortunately I’ll be 43 one day and that’s not good enough for me. Gigi was willing to put all these messy feelings into this song and send it out there into the world for pennies to receive pennies; all I can do is scrawl on a scratched up laptop. But I’m willing to scrawl until I can finally close it, gird myself, try to spark a conversation with anyone who’d like to talk. We can go forever until you want to sit it out.
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