Often, with music made in the dream pop and shoegaze realms, it is as much the music, its mood, and emotion, its hallucinogenic tones, and immersive textures that set the sonic scene as the lyrics themselves. And that is certainly the case with the new one from Pjos, as the lyrics are scant and arrive in spoken word form, leaving the music to do the lion’s share of the communication.
But I have always maintained that sound is a better communicator than words—words might lead you to one deliberate conclusion, the one that the artist has in mind, but sound allows a song to be all things to all people, they can infer and interpret, apply and respond to it in any way that is appropriate to their own lives.
Here, the ebbs and flows of shoegaze walls of sound, the loose post-rock structures, and the dreamscape atmospheres are left to build the appropriate sense of, perhaps, melancholy, nostalgia, or pathos. Take from it what you will; that is my point.
Play the video, and you are given other lyrics, but again, their obscure and poetic nature leaves the song at the perfect level of openness and mystique.
What is clever here is that the song comes with, what back in the day we would have called a b-side, a more optimistic sounding sonic response to the first track’s musical call in the form of “But It’s Gonna Be Okay.” Sparse, lyricless and dreamily ambient, but telling you everything you need to hear.
Conclusion? Lyrics are overrated. And that comes from someone who makes a living trying to juggle words to describe music on a printed page.
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