I love music which comes with embedded contradictions. Okay, such trappings and trivia aren’t the focal point, but they do make lovely little easter eggs for people like me who spend all day digging down into new music.
Take, for example, the fact that neither of this duo is called Todd or Karen (Øyvind Berge and Ina Verdi-Ruckstuhls, if you must know) or that this is an instrumental track but uses vocals as much as a rhythmic instrument as a form of communication (chants would be a fine thing!) to get the song over the line. Then there is the overall vibe, a thoroughly modern track referencing everything from Air’s cinematic sojourns to earlier proggy sounds, such as Yes and then back to 60’s psychedelia. It’s serene, ever-evolving and brilliantly original.
The b-side (do we still have such things?) is a more traditional piece of floaty, poppish acoustica. ‘Final Orbit’ again echoes those mid-sixties sounds, perhaps as reimagined by nineties indie kids and then reworked further via the early 21st-century indie explosion but always sounding slightly as if it is one of those hidden gems that we found on Moody Blues albums.
Todd & Karen make music out of time, and thus music that easily fits, undated and undatable into any era of contemporary popular music, especially the current post-genre landscape. A reminder that following trends tethers you tightly to a time and a place, something that you could never level at these smart cookies with their even smarter songs.
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