Blurring the lines between folk, dream-pop and chart accessibility, Roses, the title track of her EP, is a charming and graceful calling card. It revels in space and atmosphere, restraint and understatement, the beat doing only enough to provide sonic hooks to hang minimalist music on, the guitars used sparingly, the bass line merely punctuation points. All of this leaves her vocals the focal point of the song and what a great voice it is too. Able to wander between emotive voice,-as-instrument deliveries, and heart-felt pleas, there is something simultaneously beautifully human and eerily otherworldly weaving together at the heart of it all.
Roses is proof that young, would-be pop artists, though even as I write the word it seem woefully inadequate to describe what’s going on here, don’t have to follow the conventions imposed by those around them, that you don’t have to fall for the industry pressures to deliver quickhits and throwaway crowd pleasers. This is music being made for the long game. And if she is making music this mature at 16…yes, you read that right….16, imagine what she might be doing three or four years from now. Definitely one to keep a very close eye on.
[…] Sophie Dorsten‘s new single may be drenched in modern day indie vibes and dreamy, contemporary pop production but it also feels like it is a long forgotten gem on an old vinyl album that you found in a box of old records in the attic where it was rubbing shoulders with the likes of Carole King and Joni Mitchell. Tomorrow’s sepia drenched tones and sun-dappled sonic hues seems out of step with the beat of the modern music industry drum, but that is what makes her even more precious and perhaps even more important. […]
[…] the singles which have passed under my pen so far, Tomorrow and Roses, showed a dreamy pop side to Sophie Dorsten, you could always hear that she was choosing to operate […]