Finishing off today’s 🙁 theme…
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[6.50]
David Sheffieck: I like the way the production is both a slow build and built around a succession of flourishes, some arriving naturally and some initially jarring. Then the lyric makes me want the object of Solo’s affection to run far, far away — if the fan translation I found isn’t missing some nuance, he’s drinking too much and they’re standing by him even as he “always screws up.” And yet measured by the standard of 2017 songs about getting drunk and fucking up, Solo delivers this with a distorted penitence that makes it seem more genuine, less mythbuilding. Credit to Sam Hunt for lowering the bar, I guess.
[6]
Will Adams: Even before the guitar wail at the end I was reminded of Kanye’s “Runaway” — the distorted shouts and delicate vocoding evoked the same sense of performative self-pity. I could take or leave the electro-squelch that eventually bubbled up, but overall forlorn and feather-weight is a more interesting look to me than “Sopo”‘s hyper-pop.
[6]
Iain Mew: “Söpö” was all about excess; by contrast “Paska Sydän” is mostly about restraint, yet shares with it a gift for wringing emotion out of off-kilter sounds. In this case that means setting up a tension for the exaggerated sharp sighs to poke at without breaking up its progression.
[7]
Hannah Jocelyn: One of my least favorite songs I’ve covered on the Jukebox is “Make Me (Cry)”; in my review, I wasn’t a fan of how it went about being *minimalist*, and how awkward it felt to hear throughout as a result. This is the song “Make Me” likely wanted to be — it’s minimalist, but it’s also really pretty and the production is far superior. “Make Me” sounded like two idiots wailing at a brick wall, but “Paska Sydän” sounds like staring into an endless corridor. Even as the two share an aesthetic and the whole jump-scare sound effect thing, “Paska” does both much better, and even pulls off the last-minute explosion tastefully. Well, maybe too tastefully at parts, but even as Hank Solo sounds like he’s playing it safe for much of the first half, often retreating to “Hide and Seek”-ville from moments others would add in a drop, it makes the payoff that much better.
[7]
Claire Biddles: Sadboy vocoder vocals over squelchy synths is one of my default favs, but I don’t think this is sad enough and the sounds don’t quite hang together enough to make a whole. Maybe it’s just my personal view that all emotions should be overwrought and over-the-top, but I wish the glimpses of resigned phrasing in Hank Solo’s vocals carried through the full song.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: My one complaint is that the anguished sighs that punctuate the verses still sound unfitting and annoying after multiple listens. Otherwise, this is an intriguingly odd collage from a narrator who’s deeply unsympathetic from the title down (“paska” means “shit”, “sydän” means “heart”) and it suggests that any given English-language sad boy mope would be made a lot better by changing up the surroundings every minute or so to give a bit of nuance.
[7]