Using a song to explore how you feel about something is as old as songwriting itself. But there is a very profound line in the accompanying blurb for Riri Rose’s second single, when she says, “I can realise how I felt after a song has finished,” really gets to the heart of how songwriting can make sense of our own conflicted emotions, can focus our feelings, can be revelatory- a sonic Damascene moment.
‘I Don’t Want That Colour’ comes from the same place as Mazzy Star’s oft-misunderstood ‘Fade Into You,’ a song about how dangerous and destructive an all-consuming love can be, how you can cease to be yourself and just become something in the orbit of an object of desire.
As the song rises out of indie-folk realms and heads towards more rock realms, as the tension builds, the atmospheres become denser, darker, more deliriously devoted; it reminds us that relationships have to be a two-way street, a balance or at least an ebb and flow of effort and emotion. What Riri Rose describes here feels more like an emotional subduction zone.
It’s a sonically gorgeous song, built on finessed folk textures and distant rock guitar strands, broadening sonics and exploring vocals, but the message those vocals deliver is the vital ingredient here.
