Rollcall – B L A C K P I T C H (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

At the risk of sounding rude, Rollcall feels to me what pop music might sound like if it was made by someone on Ketamin…and I mean that in a good way…well, the end result, not the taking of industrial strength, horse tranquilliser. It’s certainly pop music but swerves the more obvious sonic tropes and the jaunty beats and instead delivers musical moves with are claustrophobic and sludgy, febrile and feavourish, filled with pent up anxiety and laced with chaos and confusion.

But why shouldn’t pop music, often the perky younger sibling of the genres, be challenging and at times confusing, appeal to a whole set of deep seated emotions as it breaks stereotypes and asks the listener to think? Really think. This is music which conveys its message through mood as much as lyric or melody, not that it isn’t oddly contagious and surprisingly appealing. Rollcall is the sound of B L A C K P I T C H asking us to think about the world around us, to accept that it is confusing, that it is made up of various blurred, greying hues rather than the black and white which is often presented to us by media, advertising, politics…those with their own, often conflicting personal agenda.

The song also suggests that it is in the grey areas that the magic happens, we find dark yins in bright yangs, we find mutually exclusive ideas nestled together like Russian dolls, we get to explore our own contradictory natures, to develop our own uniqueness. And from there, creativity and originality can blossom, from such seeds we can change the world, in small, almost imperceptible, ways, as part of a tsunami of small evolutionary changes, break-through ideas and forward-thinking developments.

Rarely has pop been this clever sonically or this literate, almost to the point of being philosophical, in its lyrical message.