Some of the best music is that which comes into life as an immediate, compelling reaction to an external stimulus. This seems true of “Everything Looks Strange On TV,” the new single from Ben Clemo. Faced with the bleak and terrifying array of images and ideas parading across his TV screen, he realised that he needed to start writing and rereleasing music, after some time away from the scene.
“Everything Looks Strange On TV’s” title says it all. As that box in the corner of the living room becomes a window on a world we increasingly fail to recognise, he felt that he needed to put into words the dissociation he felt from the images he was seeing.
But whereas many artists would turn such an idea into a fist-in-the-air protest song, Clemo opts for synth-laden indie-pop as his sonic delivery system. But then even synth-pop has radical roots, and so, like those post-punk pioneers who set the genre in motion, he manages to mix pop and politics, protest and dance, groove and rebellion.
Rabble rousing songs have their place, music to storm barricades too perhaps, but what Ben Clemo does here is create subversive dance music for both the personal revolution and to be carried through the underground clubland world on the neon-soaked, beat-driven winds of change.
It says, if we are going to change the world, let’s have a good time doing so!
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