If this is the future of indie-folk, then I’m all for it. If this is a vision of what Americana might be if it stopped playing up to the same old tired expectations, again, I’m on board. And if this is pop music reinventing itself by exploring more deft and delicate pathways, you don’t have to ask me twice to follow.
“Better Off Lost” is all those things, and none, after all; if you try to define something, then you cage it in, tie it down, limit its potential, and the one thing that is obvious from listening to The Songs of Butler & Cupples is that it is the freedom from such conventions and genres that makes their music so magical and free-spirited.
At its core, it is a delicate folk piece, of unadorned acoustic guitars and, oh man, that voice. And, as it slowly cocoons itself in dreamlike sonics and harmony vocals, beats and bass lines, somehow those trappings, rather than weighing the song down and perhaps tethering it in too much reality, instead give it wings, allow it to fly far from here, explore and embrace its otherworldly and ethereal nature.
“Formed in response to a contemporary music landscape increasingly shaped by image and perception rather than composition,” this is the sound of the most gentle fight back against the dominance of the style-over-substance world of today—something perhaps wonderfully ironic given the fleeting and floating nature of the song leading the charge. But I guess sometimes the smallest and most perfectly formed of sounds can speak volumes!
