“Sweet Life” is one of those effortlessly cool songs that skirts all the obvious categories and classifications, cleverly capturing the essence of a number of sonic mainstays which it then merges together so that the familiar meets the fresh and forward-thinking.
Rather than play the pop card, $yndrm instead deftly lays down some lo-fi bedroom pop vibes. If there is a rock element, it is of the late eighties, soulful, baggy variety. And the groove is pure 90’s trip-hop, the sound of those underground, Bristol, UK pioneers going overground, the cultish colliding with the commercial, the clubland heading into chart territory.
There is undoubtedly a lightness of touch being applied here, but we also find the same poise and sophistication at work that you see in bands such as Talk Talk or Primal Scream’s Screamadelica era. Its gentle tones and subtle textures are a wonderfully atmospheric blend of the past and the present, and in the coming together of this timeless array of succinct soul and delicate dance, ambient indie and pop perfection, it is hard not to detect the future echo of what is to come.
Pop might have a bad name these days; hip-hop is in danger of becoming a cliché, indie has devoured itself, and rock music has run aground on its own lowest common denominator. But, if you are skillful enough, as $yndrm certainly is, you can take all the best bits of each of those sonic worlds and create something more than the sum of its parts. Much more!
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