But what about the air guitar on the roof?
[Video]
[6.91]
[9]
Ian Mathers: Sort of deliberately wispy in a way that both evokes nostalgia, but also for those of us in big cities (who are used to putting up with the bad things about that for all the wonderful things about living in a big city), kind of a reminder that we’ve kept paying these ridiculous rents (or been threatened with eviction, or actually evicted) and gotten little for them than the reminder of how many of our neighbours are science denying assholes. Is that a little too much to put on this pleasant little tune? Absolutely, but that’s kind of the year it’s been.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Always heartwarming, in theory at least, to learn/remember that people are still making earnest late-2000s Feistlike indietweefolktronica in the 2020s. I would have thought everyone who would’ve listened to that in, say, 2007 was now too permanently irony poisoned to abide it. Everyone includes me, apparently; the children’s chanting was my nope-out point.
[2]
John Pinto: A wistful little tune that sounds like an outtake from “The Lemon of Pink,” right down to the unexpected pizza chant sample. I love The Books; ergo the sample is my favorite part of the song, and I find myself wishing that Meath and Sanborn had cluttered “Rooftop Dancing” with more audio detritus. Instead, Sylvan Esso take inspiration from those classic NYC songs that, when executed properly, feel like tiny pockets of bliss and peace. Do Sylvan Esso succeed in their task? The context of our moment means I have no idea. I also have no idea whether “Rooftop Dancing” will seem merely precious or cloying “after” COVID, especially since there is no “after” to this slow-mo climate apocalypse. But it’s a human impulse, I’d say THE human impulse, to obsess over “after.” Humans idealize “after” (“they lived happily ever after,” “only after everyone was vaccinated did they get brunch,” etc.) and build systems to speculate the shape of “after,” its boundaries and philosophical slant. Sometimes “after” is in the sky, with a mood conducive to dancing.
[7]
Michael Hong: Amelia Meath is the distraction, the gentle call to bring you out and get you to feel like whoever you once were. The digital coos and other voices are still there, but they fade to the background. They’re manageable. All that’s left is Amelia and dancing as an act of joy.
[8]
Austin Nguyen: “Rooftop Dancing” feels more like a voice memo my cousins and I would record when we start making random noises at the family reunion out of boredom than an actual song: a sparse collage of guitar and ukulele strums, door creaks, fragmented uh-uhs, a 2-4 tambourine beat, and a subdividing shaker that never expands beyond mezzoforte. But that’s also the entire point: a small and intimate space that seems familiar, inviting you to take in the sights and sound (“Babies double-dutching, singing their names” ranks near “otter with hats” on the Adorable Scale), pick up an instrument, and fill in the empty space with music and motion.
[7]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Sylvan Esso’s music has always been characterized by synthy extravagance — the purring synths and joyous bells of “Coffee”, the mini-sturm-und-drang of the break on “Die Young.” It’s all terribly clever, the kind of synth pop that captivates the way that kaleidoscopes or stage magicians do. On “Rooftop Dancing,” the duo instead turns their cleverness towards singing a simple song, an intentionally spare hymn to the city and its motion. It’s not entirely successful– it’s difficult to capture kinetic joy with so little — but the tenderness of Amelia Meath’s voice remains the band’s greatest strength, magnified even further by the minimalism of its backdrop.
[6]
Tim de Reuse: A song that rides entirely on the strength of its clunky, sparse treatment, its vocal chops that texture the background, and the crowd chanting in the distance. It’s a consistent style, I guess, but there’s so little else going on; its pleasant lyrical sentiments and lilting melodies are all in service of a nebulous atmosphere that establishes itself in the first thirty seconds and never significantly develops.
[5]
John Seroff: If “Rooftop Dancing” is a little slight and aughties retro, perhaps it’s not unreasonable to presume that was the intent? I have my own increasing nostalgia for a time when incidental sounds – double-dutch rhymes, cards shuffling, squeaking tennis shoes, hard drives spinning down – were a sign of life, not cause to make sure my mask was up; to when nights out with friends might mean scampering up strange stairs in a foreign building, finding a pair of kids fucking around with a drum set and a bass and a sampler on an asphalt deck overlooking the East River. I remember the simple joy of hearing a band for the first time, sharing a drink with a stranger on the fire escape, listening and looking at the city from on high, laid out beautiful and full of yet-to-come promise. Gentle things leave a mark too.
[7]
Harlan Talib Ockey: “Rooftop Dancing” feels like an exhalation — not only after the 8-bit vocoder crush of much of the rest of the album, but after this hellish year as a whole. Maybe 2020 has broken me, but I spent my entire first listen dreading the inevitable insidious creep of something malicious. I was so excited to see that it genuinely is just a sincere celebration of innocent happiness. The production expertly grows into the soundscape painted by the lyrics, keeping Meath and Sanborn in perfect balance as they exuberantly duck and whirl.
[9]
Vikram Joseph: I’ve lived in this flat for 2 years now, but it wasn’t until early May that I realised that, by climbing out of the window on the top floor, and with a little bit of mild scrambling, I could get onto a wide-open stretch of roof that sits atop my building and the one next to it. It’s only three floors up but on a good day you can see all the way across east London, from Tottenham to Canary Wharf. Even better, you can see life happening all around you – people doing yoga on their rooftops, drinking on their balconies, running for buses. You can see the overground trains sprinting towards Stratford (where hope goes to die). For a little while, in the middle of a global pandemic, I felt like I was living in a NYC bildungsroman; I dreamed of the parties we would have up there once this was over, of slow-dancing at dusk with an unspecified but highly idealised future boyfriend.
And then, just under three months later, they started building flats above the shop next to us, and the window to the roof was barricaded by scaffolding. (Can I interest you in an extremely unsubtle metaphor for the grinding down of young people’s dreams by late-stage capitalism?) The view from my roof now exists in photos and memories, and also in “Rooftop Dancing”, a song which is ephemeral like summer nights that you want to wrap yourself around for fear that they might be the last of their kind. It’s fragile but impossibly transportative, almost hesitant but never tentative. In its delicate, flickering movements you can hear the history and the rhythm of the city; stories and lives so manifold it hurts your heart to think about it. Little ribbons of synth tangle around an insistent hi-hat, and a kids’ choir a few blocks away shout something about pizza; Amelia Meath’s vocals are tranquil and hopeful as she spins sleepy summer vignettes. When I listen to this song I can feel rising heat from concrete, the soft hum of traffic below, conversations with friends, and the buzz inside my chest that I still sometimes get – that conviction that each coming summer might change my life. [9]