Obsolete – SirenBlue (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Taken from their forthcoming, and indeed coming, fourth album, Hit Like and Carry On, SirenBlue‘s latest single, Obsolete, is a reminder that pop can, despite what the current musical landscape might suggest, be smart, sophisticated, and beautiful. But then, such has been the band’s sonic signature over the years that anyone paying even passing attention to their sonic activities would expect little else.

But pop is a term that I need to qualify here. It’s a label that comes with too much baggage, and just one spin of Obsolete tells you that if this is pop, it is pop of a more poised and purposeful nature than most.

As their lush ambient blends of bubbling electronica and classical sweep, soulful guitar licks, and more rock-inclined grooves drift from the speaker, you realise that we need a new word for just such a sound—a sound that is both writ large yet wonderfully opaque, light of touch yet all-encompassing, gentle yet infectious.

But then again, perhaps we don’t need even more generic labels, not when the ones that we already have are barely fit for purpose. It’s better to just take everything on its own merit. So if well-wrought, ambient, lush pop-scapes are your thing, then SirenBlue is definitely going to be your cup of sonic java.