“International teachers of pop” as our new tagline next year y/y…???
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[7.22]
Scott Mildenhall: Playfully arch, clinically seedy and determinedly verbose, “The Ballad of Remedy Nilsson” is in a deep Sheffield tradition that its creators have long played a part in — former All Seeing I member Dean Honer’s Britney royalties could well have bankrolled the whole thing. While the band say it’s about vocalist Leonore Wheatley’s disobedient cats, her apocryphal lyrics (and Gainsbourgy title) are given meaning by the intensity of their delivery. High and low she goes, like an Italo ghost, intermittently haunting and threatening, never quite admitting that she’s just draped herself in an eye-holed white sheet. The delight seeps through; it’s palpably the work of musicians whose appreciation of pop is both considered and visceral.
[8]
Vikram Joseph: I googled Remedy Nilsson, assuming they were an obscure celebrity — a silver medal-winning winter biathlon winner, perhaps, or a Swedish folk singer — but it turns out they’re a cat. There are fewer songs about cats than you might think — John K Samson would be proud. Anyway, far from being twee, this is fever-pitch disco, somewhere between ABBA and Donna Summer, with entertainingly elliptical lyrics (“a sobering event, like the antibiotics I had on my birthday”) and a spiralling synth line that threatens to overtake the song completely.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: A garish chromatic synth loop, kind of like something that’d play before a boss battle, slapped onto a twitchy “Popcorn”-ish beat and, later, a blatant bite of “Celebration” (I guess that’s what they’re teaching me internationally), then set loose to run rickety all over the place. Between the arrangement and the vocals — verses alternating between an eager Elly Jackson-ish affect and spoken-word bits that get to sotto voice but not all the way to icy or cool — it’s janky in the best way, like Tieranniesaur or Slow Club sometimes.
[8]
Iain Mew: Personal predecessors to this course are easy enough to come up with — basic La Roux synths, vocals on the edge of Born This Way, associating the title with the rich DIY electropop of Little Boots. The closest comparison I can think of for its particular strengths is less in sound and more in feeling though, being CSS at their height, voraciously pulling in ideas and spitting them out faster still, cheeky but completely sincere.
[8]
Alfred Soto: Beats and synth loops like they used to make ’em, which aren’t enough anymore, but the vocal fervor combines with the simplicity of the chorus and spoken word for a delightful retro-nuevo frisson.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: A sloping up synth progression loops for 4 limbs, then a warping bass slips in and begins to strut, with flat spinning drums underneath. A flushed synth progression replaces it, then a soft, silvery voice cuts through the synth overgrowths, with a sharp, cool chant over the synth progression, replaced with the bass and drums as the vocalist sprinkles a sharp chant over a smooth bass transition with a new synth plug, repeating the chant until it stops dead, then jumps up again as the synths are squished together over the bass and drums until it evaporates in a whisper.
[7]
Kayla Beardslee: Dooon’t gooo wasting your emoootiooon, laaay all your pop onnn meee. Yeah, my standards for enjoyable synthpop may not be sky-high, but it’s hard to prioritize the song’s lack of a unique sound when it smacks you in the face with that ABBA-esque disco groove.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: This is what I imagine ABBA would (or should) sound like in 2019, and what I wish Robyn sounded like in 2019, too. Sparkly!
[7]
Tim de Reuse: A pleasant if unadventurous synthpop palette, buoyed by the clinical specificity of the verses; putting lines about antibiotics and chipped teeth in such an upbeat wail is a gimmick, I think, but it’s a good one.
[6]