No it isn’t Sophia Allison and she hasn’t joined forces with Millwall fans to be a football hooligan (although that would make for an interesting spectacle).
Having slogged my way through the Singles and EPs/Albums of the Year what better way to wind down for Christmas than with his choice piece of ‘post-punk’ from the duo that comprises Anders Bergström and Thomas Wahlström, since 2017.
You know, I’m never sure quite what to make of anything labelled ‘post-punk’ these days. Is punk really ‘over’ as it would have to be for ‘post-punk’ even to exist, as it has done for decades?
It seems that these two guys have been around the block and actually date back to the 1970s, when post-punk first appeared, as a slightly more melodic, upmarket version of punk (think The Cure, Joy Division, Talking Heads etc).
I don’t know what they make of latter day punk, the sort practiced by bands like IDLES, and which always sounds plastic to me. At least the disenfranchised, dole queue kids of the 1970s had plenty to beef about.
But academic discussions are for another day. What we have here is a song that I can’t immediately get my head around. It starts off almost as the antithesis of punk, with something that sounds suspiciously like the prog rock style that the arrival of punk was supposed to have put paid to.
Then, before you can say ‘God save the Queen’ a cultured saxophone comes in, stage left, straight out of a swish jazz supper club, followed by a melody, riff and vocal that might be a collaboration of Hazel O’Connor, XTC and Jethro Tull.
Let’s just say it’s a rather dystopian song, with limited, though clever, lyrics. Fundamentally the singer comes across as a hopeless case who sees himself as unable to escape his fate. It may be the case that he is contemplating suicide, as the voice he keeps hearing is actually his own.
“The sun never rises above our horizon/it’s us losing height.”
“Can’t get your voice out of my head/the same voice that wants me dead.”
“That’s how it feels/don’t know if it’s real.”
It’s a case of make your own mind up, as it should be.
You’ll probably need to listen to ‘That’s how I feel’ a couple of times at least before you get into it but if you have any empathy at all you assuredly will.
This is the first single from their forthcoming album, due out in February 2023.
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