eighty-three.

[cabaretlights.livejournal.com]

Black Star
Artist: Queen of Hearts
Album: The Arrival EP
Year: 2011
♥: Three things this week:

1) As the internet kind of levels the music-snob playing field -- obscure artists getting top 20 hits, indie blog iPad apps -- I'm starting to find that genre itself is getting a bit...twisted. Insofar as: when I hear a song, these days, it's quite common that I can't quite classify it. Alex Clare was a great example -- folk dubstep? What? -- and everyone loved it; I even heard it on a Top 40 radio station this weekend. Not only is genre-bending increasingly common, trying to identify within your genre is getting increasingly difficult. Gone are the days when electro-industrial was the property of dark alternative clubs...now you can hear it (or influences of it) before breakfast.

Queen of Hearts -- and "Black Star" more specifically -- and her producers have taken some pretty dark elements of electronic music (i.e. the goth, the industrial, the dubstep, the d'n'b-cum-breakbeat) and, rather brilliantly, stirred them all into a pop confectionary. Like whipped cream dyed black or ultraviolet. It's a nice reminder that you can be as dark or as fluffy or as pretentious or down-to-earth as you want ---- music is going to reach whoever wants to be reached by it.


2) Electronic music reaches me pretty intensely. I can find beauty and emotion in breakcore digitization much as I can find it in classical symphonies -- that is, unconsciously. It just strikes the right chords (or, maybe more appropriately: pushes the right buttons), and I go weak inside -- when it's done well, of course. And "Black Star" is done well. This is the exact style of electronic music that I am most interested in: weird beats with hooks and melodies, lovely voices that can pack a sonic punch, layer upon layer of strange, strange shit. It sounds new, in a time when so many artists are borrowing from each other -- genre, style, and samples. Electronic music can get pretty fucking boring, and that's depressing...because there are so many opportunities for something really powerful. This, I feel in the tips of my fingers, is powerful.


3) "Fill my head with your thoughts
Ready for the onslaught
Tangled in your skin
Desolate and hopeful
This is where it all begins."

I very much like when music sounds like it belongs in a particular setting. In this case ---- the bedroom.