Joselin (Sweden) – Elegantly (single)
We don’t usually have many artists in here that have come through the TV ‘Idol’ route and any mention of Taylor Swift, as in the press release I received, typically sends me scurrying for cover.
Not only has Joselin (Fogelberg)performed on Sweden’s version of idolatry, she’s won a national radio contest as well.
Joselin is a 22-year-old (she looks younger) songwriter, artist and music producer out of Gothenburg but now based in Stockholm who only signed with the Swedish record label Ninetone Group, this February. She’s actually come the ‘academic’ route into the business with spells at, inter alia, Berklee Music College in the US, and the Lillehammer Institute of Music Production in Norway which is backed by Stargate, the Norwegian production company with a list of stars as long as War and Peace.
Will she join them in due course? Well I do like this song of her’s, ‘Elegantly’. An example perhaps of onomatopoeia (I’ve never quite understood how that works so stand to be corrected) because it is delivered in an elegant fashion and with some of the Swift-ish traits to boot, albeit rocked up a bit.
The song concerns struggling to recover from a broken relationship while the other, now detached, half seems to be able to do it so effortlessly. We’ve all been there, love.
It’s well constructed, with several changes of direction between verses and chorus. It’s upbeat despite the subject matter, almost as if she’s musing philosophically over the situation rather than spitting feathers. It could be a Eurovision pop song yet it rocks out when it has to, has a strong hook and vocally, channeling Kate Bush at times, she fluctuates succinctly between helpless little girl and independent alpha female.
And she’s no one trick Pony, believe me. I checked out her previous single, the Emmy the Great-like ‘Painkiller’ and that’s even better.
Find her on:
Website: https://www.joselinartist.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Joselinartist/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joselinartist/
Tobias Arbo (Sweden) – Pyre (single)
Staying in Sweden and with the unrequited lurve theme, Tobias Arbo (Tobias Ekelund)isn’t pining over a lost love that is stylishly moving on as much as lamenting that his secret admiration for A N Other isn’t being reciprocated and probably never will be.
He says, “Instead of saying something about how you really feel, you pretend to be unbridled in order to stay close to the person, because they would likely withdraw if you revealed your feelings. In this way, you build your own prison – rather be close to the person and suffer, than lose it and move on”.
The prison analogy is an interesting one, I’ve never thought of it like that and if it’s worth anything to him he prompted me to think about my own position and do something about it. Like break out of that cell.
I’m not sure whether it amounts to a funeral ‘Pyre’ though, that’s perhaps a little too dramatic, even if he wants to punish himself for not being ‘good enough’ for the other person to love him.
It’s a sad song through the intro, the floaty synthesiser and pad notes indicating a confused mind. Then, about a third of the way through the beat picks up along with his vocal tone and the song gains traction rapidly as the stark realisation that life goes and there are plenty more fish in the sea even if he can’t find his rod.
Then there’s a peculiar short outro of various little electronic noises which might have come from ‘WALL-E’ that I can’t get my head around but which made me think of a mind suddenly going into meltdown, overwhelmed by over-thinking.
An interesting song all round. See what you make of it.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tobiasarbo/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tobiasarbo/
