It is amazing what you can do, how much you can say, what ideas you can provoke within the space of a song that runs for under two minutes. Especially a song that seems to embody everything that those in the know, or at least those in mainstream circles, would tell you, goes against everything that a pop single should be about. Welcome to the world of Kramies.
First, let’s talk about what we have in front of us. “Perfectly Dreadful” feels like what it is: the opening track to an album (Goodbye Dreampop Troubadour is released on October 10th). This haunting, piano-led melody evokes the incidental music to a musical theatre production based on Grimm’s fairy tales or part of a Tim Burton soundtrack. Less a song in the conventional sense, more a sonic experience.
It is beautiful, understated, and melancholic, short, bittersweet, and brilliant, woven of simple musical lines and dramatic tensions, dark crescendos and fragile lulls—the sound of a door opening to another world and us being beckoned over its threshold. And with a video that seems to be a sinister collection of found footage frames, it is truly an odd —and wonderfully so — audio-visual experience.
But if you know the Kramies story, there is more at work here, too. Having picked up the moniker, “Dreampop Troubadour” for the blends of drifting and deft indie-popscapes that he has made in the past, the latest album, as the title suggests, is the sound of him moving into new territories. If that tag has almost become a presence in its own right, a personality or character that walks through the music, or an expectation on the part of the listener, this new album will be the sound of Kramies dispelling it, gently slaying the beast, or at least writing a new sonic chapter so that it can at least be allowed to evolve. And what better way to open the process with this strange, fleeting ballad?
If you were in the pop business and advising Kramies of the best course of action, you would tell him that everything he is doing here is wrong, but that is what makes it so right. If what he is doing here is the opposite of what you do to get a mainstream pop hit, then he is exactly where he needs to be.
Why be obvious when you can be intriguing? Why follow the herd when you can beat your own path through the forest… especially when the forests are full of the stuff of folklore, the place where the pixies and the ogres live, the place on the map marked “here be dragons?”
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