Ida No
It is true that everything which is drastically uncool will, at some point, be primed for hipness once more. This is how I like to think of my Trisha Yearwood concert shirt: Ugly and gauche when Trisha Yearwood was on tour in 1997; still pretty fucking ugly in 2008, but so distanced from Trisha's heyday that it could be cool (pretty please?).
Portland's Glass Candy takes disco, which was pretty lame about 20 years ago (according to what I gleamed from the Freaks and Geeks episode "Discos and Dragons"), and inserts an unsettling despondency into their tracks that set them apart from their forebears. Johnny Jewel and Ida No (cool ass names right?) are the sole members of Glass Candy, while Jewel also puts in time with Chromatics and Farah, the three of whom are all label mates on Italians Do It Better.
Glass Candy's lovely 2007 EP B/E/A/T/B/O/X gives you the impression that Jewel and No belong to some kind of underground demimonde that they find heartless while reveling in that same emptiness. Jewel's beats feel either lazy or tight, but they all manage to dream around a kind of decadence that No's washed out, ethereal vocals drug the listener with. No simply talks through some of the songs, and when in "Digital Versicolor" she whispers, "This is red, red, red, red, red. This is orange, orange, orange, orange, orange. This is yellow. This is yellow. This is yellow," though the lyrics might not mean anything to your head, the rest of you feels like you can see a pretty girl walking home by herself at 3AM on a Saturday morning, her purse dangling from her fingers, wiping off her lipstick with a napkin.
Boy did I just romanticize the shit out of that or what?
2 comments:
matthew. that's such a beautiful image. although, if you're a girl, walking home by yourself at 3am isn't really that beautiful and poetic but like, fucking scary. Nonetheless, well done, Emily D.
yeah, awesome image!
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