Skip to main content

Love At First Listen

 
   Sometimes you fall completely in love with music on first listen. It can be a dazzling guitar solo, the exemplary vocal harmonies, the powerful lyrics, or the amazing orchestral backing tracks. And, before you know it, you're in love with the song, the artist, the entire album.

   The general public may not recognize these two ladies, but to indie music fans worldwide, BOY, composed of Swiss singer Valeska Steiner and German bassist Sonja Glass, are bona fide superstars. The two met years ago at a music camp in Hamburg, and the friendship that prevailed over the years has produced Mutual Friends — the duo's debut album.

   I remember staying for a bit more at the bar, the first time I heard Drive Darling. I was immediately hooked. From the in-wall speakers behind me it came; a song I can describe only as pure, unadulterated music. I had never seen BOY perform before but I admired them instantly. And I loved that I didn’t know anything about them even more.


And when we arrive
The hardest of goodbyes
You will dry my eyes
Somehow you're always by my side
The one who holds my kite
And watches over all my flights


   BOY writes and sings catchy, straightforward pop-folk songs about life and relationships. There's one about a waitress, one about waiting by the phone, and another about moving to a big city. I am swept by their song's lyrical integrity, their austerity, the organic sound of real instruments, along with the delicate unraveling of the splendid musical arrangements.


   Drive Darling is not just a song. It's a story, a beautiful yet sad story.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Weirdly Charming

If you’re a fan of art that makes you do a double-take, you need to check out  Richard Brener . Based in the UK, Richard is an internationally collected artist who works primarily with ink, fineliners, and gouache. When you first see his pieces, they actually look pretty playful. Then you realize the entire canvas is packed with thousands of tiny, ghost-like shapes he calls "champs." They’re all squeezed together like commuters on a rush-hour train, and the level of detail is honestly mind-blowing. Richard spends hundreds of hours drawing these little guys over and over. It’s obsessive, very intentional, and a little bit wild. The cool part is that the longer you stare, the more the vibe shifts. Check out more photos below:

These master glassblowers make the difficult look easy

I've never seen Glas before and I'm absolutely delighted that Aeon Magazine uploaded the short doc on its Vimeo channel . Directed by Bert Haanstra, the 10-minute film about glass making won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary in 1959. "[ Glas ] contrasts the production of hand made crystal from the Royal Leerdam Glass Factory with automated bottle making machines in the Netherlands. An industrial film with a bebop heart, its lyrical use of light and sound still looks and sounds fabulous, nearly 60 years after it was made."

This prosthetic leg is 1,500 years old

A lot of people have shared about this on social media, but since we live in an era where new information is hurled at us constantly, things like the 1,500-year-old prosthetic foot are easily forgotten. So here it is, a prosthesis made of wood and an iron ring dating from the sixth century. It was discovered in 2013 in Hemmaberg, Austria, but it was only recently that the findings about the foot have emerged. "The wood has deteriorated, and all that remains is an iron ring, barely over three inches in diameter, to stabilize the device. There is also a dark staining on the lower leg bones, perhaps left from a leather pouch used to strap the prosthesis to the man’s leg. Besides preservation challenges, there’s another reason that few prosthetic devices survive in the archaeological record: It was tough to survive grisly amputations in pre-antibiotic times." Read 'Mind-Blowing' Archaeological Find: Wooden Prosthetic for a Medieval Foot at Atlas Obscura.