On again. Off again. Seems to be the pattern with the upkeep of this blog. No explanation really, other than I wasn’t in the mood. It happens from time to time. But it doesn’t mean I don’t care. It just means I don’t care to stop down and write my thoughts for a given period of time. I believe some might call it burn out. Like, I said, it happens.
So it’s all kinds of appropriate that I start back up with a track titled “Does It Look As If I Care.” It kind of describes how I feel. But in the most polite possible way, of course. It comes from Danish artist Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, who operates as soloist under the banner Choir of Young Believers. He also features a cast of rotating musicians to complement his compositions, none of which I know. But I’d guess they have some recognition in the homeland.
This one falls in the indie pop category. It also gets tagged as chamber pop, avant pop, and orchestral pop. Clearly, the key word is pop. But honestly, I find that when Scandinavian artists tackle that particular mantle, the results tend to be very different than what that label implies here in the states. Think of this as a slightly choral, mildly torchy slow-burn stroll through lo-fi spiritual soul. It’s both grandiose and intimate, dark and full of shadows, lucidly dreamlike and soothing in its off-kilter melodic skew.
It’s also a sprawling 9 minutes, which quite honestly, I didn’t even notice until it started evolving in unexpected ways, meandering into seemingly improv’d ephemeral wisps of cabaret piano and minimalist everything else. Somewhere around the two-thirds mark, it shifts again, slipping further into the dreamspace, mutating into stripped down sci-fi indie-scored subliminality,
Makrigiannis holds it all together with his soft soaring vocals, deep and high, layered in cushioned echoes of ethereality. It’s an intriguingly balanced contrast to the stripped down rhythms, providing just the right level of mellifluous melody to flesh out and fill out the aural wonder and wander.
“Does It Look As If I Care” is a few years old, hailing from the 2016 album “Grasque,” which I’m only just now experiencing in snips and scans, while I pen my thoughts to this post. I think I’ll be giving this a more in-depth listen in the days ahead, as it seems to take similar twists and turns in experimental, experiential pop transmutations. If you like this track, I suggest you do too.
In the meantime, here’s Choir of Young Believers “Does It Look As If I Care.” In answer to that, I mostly do. But like I said earlier, sometimes I don’t. Let’s see how long it takes me to author the next post. Cheers.
“Does It Look As If I Care” from the 2016 album “Grasque”
