I used to go and watch a band called The Dacoits whenever they were playing nearby. They were great, almost a musical obsession. They came and went far too quickly, with just a string of incendiary gigs and an ep or two to show that they had passed through the music scene at all. In pop culture terms, they lived fast, died young and left behind a beautiful sonic corpse. They played addictive, indie music like an alt-rock band, a combination of cool moves and low-slung grooves, they married delicacy with drive, beat with beauty, light with shade and did so with panache and style. In many ways, I still mourn their passing. But that ends now. Now I have SirenBlue.
SirenBlue is everything that I have described above and more. They feel like they are the product of the moment but actually have 20 years of experience to back things up, give or take a few hiatus and the occasional creative tangent.
Every Other Weekend is like that girl you admire from afar, the one that is beautiful and cool but slightly intimidating too, full of grace and femininity but able to hold her own, the one that you are too afraid to ask out and who you certainly don’t want to piss off. Okay, a bit of a tortured metaphor but you know what I mean.
It is an effortlessly addictive song, one that takes the melodic infectiousness of pop music, the integrity and grit of rock and the glamour and cool of indie. It exists at a very specific point on the musical Venn Diagram, one that all bands aiming for mainstream acceptance and chart success try to unlock. Few do, SirenBlue is one of those few.
I’m not saying that this is the start of a more meaningful, more mature, much needed musical revolution, one where style over substance chart music is ousted from office by more robust and more deftly constructed left-field musical know-how and forced to take its dance routines and autotuners, its seventy-three writers and producers and revealing outfits as it clears its desk. But you can dream, can’t you?
