Many might assume that political songs, those built around social commentary and demanding change, are the bastion of the more aggressive end of the music spectrum, rockers raging against the machine or punks sonically storming the barricades. But this is not the case. Folk music, as far back as the 40’s and 50’s, was always a hotbed of revolutionaries, as was 70’s hip-hop, and even 80’s pop music had its fair share of rabble rousers.
I mention this last one because just as Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark gave us the anti-war song, “Enola Gay,” and Red Flag discussed Cold War tensions with “Russian Radio,” Tsunamiz’s latest, “We’ll Stand Forever” offers us “a sonic manifesto of human resilience” in these dark days.
As always, labelling Tsunamiz’s music is not that simple; sure, there is a good amount of nostalgic electro-pop found running through its veins, a sound that reminds us of bands like early Depeche Mode and Alphaville, but that is far from the whole story. Through these crisp, digital soundscapes, he drives big, anthemic guitars and polishes the entire thing with excellent vocal treatments and liquid sonics, at times sounding not a million miles away from the likes of Queen, at least when they started embracing synth technology as the seventies gave way to the eighties.
Pop has never been the simple, throwaway music that it gets labelled as, at least it never used to be. Thanks to Tsunamiz, it is once again an intelligent force in the modern musical landscape. How great is that?
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