While you might argue over where ‘Just Another Me’ sits in the grand scheme of things – pop, rock, indie – it is the darkness that Lala Vale weaves through the song’s sonic lines, that haunting quality found lingering in the breaths between the words, the drama that pools in the spaces between the notes, that really defines it. She pushes the more accessible pop elements into gothic corners; she deftly subdues the usual vibrancy of indie music without losing its cool; she turns rock’s dense onslaughts into spacious yet powerful soundscapes.
The result is a song that is heavy when it wants to be, rising to create cascades and crescendos, but for the most part is happy to groove on a brooding bassline, the only constant through the ever-shifting landscape of light and shade, weight and grace that the song saunters seductively through.
This is a song spiritually inhabited by the goddess Janus, a sonic beast with two faces, capturing the complexities of simultaneously loving two people, of splitting your life into distinct and separate halves, balancing the impossible, wearing a different face depending on which world you have to navigate. And whilst on the surface, such a dilemma might seem selfish and self-imposed, as the song reveals, it is more complex than that.
Such duality is echoed through the video, a monochrome affair of shifting identities and contrasting personalities. Pop, even at its most alternative, rock-infused and dark, as it is here, can be many things, but rarely is it this brave!
