There is a strange mix of musical stances to be found on Trust Fall, the latest single from San Francisco, one woman powerhouse Iva Toric. On the one hand, her voice lends itself to the more symphonic and classical territory. It is confident and crystal clear, rich and fulsome. On the other hand, the music – the gyrating guitars, the tsunami beats, the pulsating basslines – are straight out of the brooding rock and roll playbook.
The result is a blend of the graceful and the gothic; the deft, the delicate and the doom-laden, the incendiary and the ornate: a contradiction, a conundrum, the sound of sonic worlds colliding, of opposites attracting.
Too many bands believe it is enough to be loud, powerful, bombastic and aggressive. That is fine, but if you go that route, you also need to embrace elements like melody and addiction, diction and clear lines of musical demarcation between instruments. Without it, you have just another salvo of muddy, under-whelming music, a pointless show of force, and boring machismo that we have heard so many times before. Do it properly, juggle all of the elements effectively, and you end up with something as graceful and exciting as Trust Fall.
