There’s a seriously annoying advert on British TV right now that has a ruggedly handsome young dude working out down the gym. “You!” it intones, “you jog, you run, you sprint, you jump, you lift (weights) you…”, as he smiles conceitedly at the camera, toned body glistening.
You (pardon the pun) get the idea. Narcissus is some sort of superman the girls are joining a lengthy queue to date, drafted in to help sell the product; whatever it is (I don’t even know!)
But it could just as easily have added “you dribble, you belch, you fart, you wet your pants”. Nobody’s perfect and it’s probably the case that he secretly acknowledges that fact, indeed that he has deep insecurities that will never feature in an advert.
And that is the fundamental tenet of Blondage’s new single, ‘Phony’, the first in six years after the duo of Pernille Smith-Sivertsen and Esben Nørskov Andersen took time out to start family but remained steadfastly aware that the musical chemistry between them was as potent as the romantic one.
‘Phony’ is a journey into the mind of someone who is lost in a spiral of over analysing and judging themselves, lurching between performative arrogance and suppressed self-loathing, depending on whose mirror he is standing in front of.
In fact, to get all arty-farty literate for a moment it’s the direction Holden Caulfield might have headed in, in a sequel to Catcher in the Rye, taking on most of the elements of a ‘phony’ himself, a direction he was heading in throughout his coming of age novel.
The lyricism here is sharp and cuts to the bone, with no quarter given or taken from the opening verse:
“I’m loser, I’m a loner, I’m a weirdo, I’m a geek
I’m a genius, I’m a phony, I’m a sell out, I’m a freak”
Those nouns must encompass the majority of reasons for ending up in a psychoanalyst’s chair.
But the coup de grace comes in the repeated chorus:
“Sometimes I’m dope
Sometimes I’m down
Sometimes I’m fucking ‘round in between”.
Yep, we all know someone like that and sometimes those words come home to roost, too.
Musically, it’s like a dizzying magical mystery tour, somewhere between classical and art-pop in its construction, with elements of loud maximalist hyperpop, TV and cinematic scoring and, in utter contrast, multiple gentle acoustic and choral passages including baroque guitar or mandolin picking, utilising a panoply of instrumentation with what sounds like a sitar and harmonium in the mix along with a part natural, part autotuned vocal from Pernille, perhaps intended to emphasis the polarised ends of the psychological spectrum.
It really is one for the connoisseur of avant pop and when you’ve figured it all out you can move on to the video and tell me what the blue eyed Greek mask is all about. Putting my arty-farty hat back on I did consider for a moment that it might be somehow connected to ‘The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes’, a very recently released Greek film that deals with a coming-of-age allegory about societal fear, diversity, and the heavy cost of being labelled as an outsider.
But that would really be pushing the boat out.
Answers on a postcard.
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