“Gone To Bed,” my first sonic encounter with colby!, made me ponder the state of pop music today. In the age of the single, pop was king, yet as it sought to compete with the ascendance of other sounds and styles, it seemed to head ever further into the realm of gimmicks and lowest common denominator sonics. Which was why that single was such a breath of fresh air, perhaps even something that could instigate a bit of a fightback for the genre.
Well, if that was indeed the start of a fight back, Dead Giveaway, her latest EP, sounds like the beginnings of a whole underground, alt-pop movement. Yes, this is pop, for want of a better term, but the five songs found here are infused with other interesting sonics, sounds normally associated with styles beyond pop’s borders—way beyond.
The title track, which opens proceedings, runs on a sort of motorik-infused dance groove, which in turn drives an alt-pop song built of mercurial tones and mellifluous textures and slightly reminiscent of the much overlooked Wasuremono, another band doing interesting things with pop music.
“Gone To Bed” is a quirky, folktronic masterpiece, “Break Me Twice” pushes up against a more mainstream R&B sound while not quite confirming the rules of that world, “Moving On” is a fractured and fragile, chilled dance piece and “Doing What I Can” is…well, suffice it to say that it is its own beast – shimmering and seductive but also strange and pulling at all sorts of sonic strands from any number of other musical realms.
Yes, it is pop music, but this is pop music forging ahead rather than conforming to what has gone before. Shouldn’t all music do that…pop music, if this is indeed pop music, more than most.
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