And now she’s a girl. Can we make it any more obvious?
[Video][Website]
[5.40]
Patrick St. Michel: The simplicity El Perro del Mar displays here ends up being really hypnotic. The music slowly builds up while she sings a few lines, most of them bring or related to the title. The directness of her voice and music – coupled with the lyrics themselves, the sort of stuff you want to try figuring out the meaning behind – makes this one easy to keep queuing up.
[7]
Alfred Soto: This compendium of sparkles and beatboxes sounds like Beach House, who offer little beyond static dignity. A catchphrase and video — what else you got?
[4]
Will Adams: Both the instrumental and lyrics march in place with a frustrating two-steps-forward-one-step-back progression. The polyrhythms try to liven things up but end up clashing with each other.
[4]
Doug Robertson: More electronica that’s so laid back it could function as a spirit level, albeit one with a bubble of bliss floating in a liquid pool of darkly subtle sweetness. A phrase fragment repeats and evolves as we journey — and it is a journey — towards a climax as satisfying as one the Lost writers could only have dreamed of producing. It’s music for the night time, not the night club.
[8]
Rebecca A. Gowns: “I was a boy, before you came…I was a boy, I was a boy, then I was your girl.” Beneath all the subtext that one could read into these sparse lyrics, there’s just one message, like a note scribbled on the back of a receipt: I was a person when I was alone, and now I’m attached to you. It’s quite clever, because there’s no simile; it’s not “before you came, I was my own person, as if I were a boy [because boys are the only figures that are understood as people],” just “I was a boy, then I was your girl.” No transition words like “became,” just a very simple statement, expounded upon with a few extra phrases: “I was a sailor,” “I was a soldier,” “I was a discoverer,” “My best friend was my brother.” Likewise, the video seems simple, but allows for a bit of complication in showing us less… as her eyes are locked into focus and her mouth is blurred. The song as a whole is as simple as an egg, which is to say, simple in form, but not necessarily content. I’ll have to chew on it some more.
[8]
Brad Shoup: EPDM drags the landscape like a poison cloud, or a twitchier “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl”. It doesn’t accrue weight like the latter — call it another wispy song-nothing, perhaps — but the intro is still plenty heavy on its own. I love her variable meter, the way she falls behind and skips ahead. The monosynth recorder chirps provide New Age shiver; sadly, they revoke her martial credentials.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: For a love song, this is rather inert, its emotional palette muted almost to nothing. There are really only two ways to explain that: either she’s trying to undercut the love story — which would be characteristic, at least, and the gender stuff supports it — or the track’s just underwritten. Alas, benefit of the doubt isn’t the same as replay value.
[5]
Anthony Easton: Declarations of desire have never sounded so timid.
[2]
Jonathan Bogart: Formal minimalism is often a good choice for wispy indie-pop, imposing a structure and a discipline on what might otherwise be undistinguished gloop. The danger that always accompanies the choice, though, is that it will always betray a lack of ideas.
[4]
Iain Mew: Waves of pure calm, offset by a lyric that can’t help but disrupt. It almost works to create something great, but it’s too blank and cryptic, the words not carrying far enough to get me anywhere. Though at some level I do want to listen to it another thirty times to see if it reveals itself.
[5]