Rhea’s Top 5 Songs (Possibly)
When somebody asks me about my music taste, I always struggle to articulate what it is. I definitely like music, I spend a lot of time listening to it and it makes long train journeys pass infinitely faster. But there’s not really a particular genre or a well-known artist I can point at and say “Oh, you know them”? The only logical thing to do then, is to try and pick five songs I really really like and write a little paragraph on them on this blog that at most a handful of people will see!
5. The Old Haunt - The Dear Hunter
Genre: Rock
It’s safe to say that The Dear Hunter was the artist that got me into progressive music as a whole. I am a big fan of their five-album long concept the Acts and I think Act IV and V in particular are a cut above in terms of their musical versatility. They do some really fun experiments with disco and jazz, but my pick of the crop is this song which is more traditional to their usual style but no less interesting. Frankly, I lack the musical intuition to figure out what’s going on with the time signatures at points in the verses but it keeps a tight structure that comes back to the thumping 5/4 chorus that makes you want to yell “YOU WANNA LEAVE YOUR HOME” every time it comes around. I also really, really like this song’s ending. It completely breaks with the rest of the rock track and goes into a far less dense section featuring a flute, and leads into the ending that feels delightfully unresolved as one of the album’s leitmotifs plays us out. Lovely.
4. Papercut - Zedd ft. Troye Sivan
Genre: Progressive House/EDM
I’m not actually that big of a fan of most of Zedd’s discography. His biggest hits like Clarity and Beautiful Now are fine, they do the job of laying down a catchy EDM beat and I enjoy listening to them but aren’t something I’d actively seek out. So why do I have a song from his 2015 Album True Colors that wasn’t even a single on this list? Well, this song is a little different from the standard Zedd fare. At 7:23 it’s long, and its structure is immaculate. The first 3:30 or so use a pretty standard Verse-Chorus formula that lay down the foundations of the beat. It’s not until after this point that the track begins to show its true colours (ha!) as it breaks down into a long, hypnotic, progressive section that takes the underlying beat and adds layers and layers of gorgeous synths. I’m not joking when I say it’s hypnotic, I can zone out to this on a train and the minutes will just fade into nothingness as I’m absorbed by the trance, it’s incredible. Seamlessly it transitions back into the vocals for a final chorus and it feels like you’ve been on an entire journey that is somehow there, yet not.
3. Never Look Away - Vienna Teng
Genre: Indie Pop/Dance
Vienna Teng is an Indie Pop artist that I’m quite fond of. Most of her discography consists of beautiful piano tracks, most notably Stray Italian Greyhound which I think does one of the best jobs of capturing the feeling of crushing on someone that I’ve heard in musical form. Never Look Away is a little different. It’s much more of a dance track but it maintains some of Teng’s stronger qualities, particularly her lyricism. The flow of the words with the music is impeccable and she uses gorgeous metaphorical language to evoke emotion, for example, from the first verse alone:
You feel the echo
Electrify the resistance in your broken heart
And burn it up, oh
We're gonna photosynthesize and drink up the sunrise
Musically, the first couple of verses are tightly written and all build towards the incredible crescendo starting at 2:11. I don’t know much about love, but I imagine that if it could create a flood in musical form, it would probably sound something like this.
2. Ghosts (Australia) - Henry Saiz & Band
Genre: Progressive Electronic
At only 3.6k views on YouTube, this is easily my most obscure pick, but it’s a track I’ve consistently returned to over the last few years. This album was actually Kickstarter funded, with Saiz travelling to every continent in the world to seek inspiration and instrumentation for the album Human. In particular, this track features didgeridoos which on its own is pretty cool, to be honest. But outside of that it’s an immaculate display of progressive electronica, with buildups and breakdowns, along with vocals that carry us through the journey. The repetition of motifs grounds us, whilst there is enough variation to keep interest, and it builds to a lovely climax at the end.
1. Pachinko, Pt. 1 - Moron Police
Genre: Progressive Rock/Pop/Metal
When trying to get into prog as a whole, I often find it difficult. I find the tracks sometimes get caught up in themselves, and I get lost in overly complicated rhythms that whilst I’m sure are technically accomplished and objectively “good” music, tend to leave me behind. What I need then, is something that fuses pop music with progressive rock. Enter Moron Police and their 2019 album A Boat on the Sea, aside from the gorgeous artwork and highly resonant anti-war message their pop-inspired melodies made the sometimes intimidating behemoth of the progressive rock genre accessible to someone like me, who often wants to like the genre more than I actually do. Six years later, and their followup album Pachinko is on the way, and if this lead single is anything to go by we’re in for a treat. It’s got the signature Moron Police bops but they’ve explored into a heavier direction. There are a few sections here that might’ve repelled me if they hadn’t been balanced with the easy to digest pop-inspired sections, but combined with their repetition to allow my ears to adjust to what they’re doing musically, and just the sheer amount of fun injected into the song, the heavy sections somehow work together with the lighter ones to produce what can only be described as an orgasm to my ears. It’s eleven minutes and forty four seconds of pure musical joy.