Steve Singh – Heavy Metal Sunset

An album’s technicality can often be alienating for its listener – the music losing itself in its instrumentation. This alienation can be a tool, or an unintended pitfall that detracts from the listener’s enjoyment. On his third release, Heavy Metal Sunset, Steve Singh accomplishes the former, exploring the irreverent emptiness of clean-cut pop.

What is most prominent in the album’s quick and carefully crafted musical shifts is a giddiness that lightheartedly pokes at life’s more serious issues. The message seems to be that there is nothing malevolent in modernity, and that the emptiness that it entails allows freedom in purposelessness.

On Heavy Metal Sunset’s opening track from which the album takes it’s name, a bop-brushed drumbeat suddenly gives way to a poppingly modulated and soulful Steve Singh singing, “Heavy metal sunset glare/ Fills the sky to wash my hair,” with a grounded bass voice to back him on harmonies. Each round of the song’s rolling riff adds more to its layering, until an eventual sterile carnival is achieved.

What is most endearing about the album may also be its biggest pitfall. It plays like a flea circus that is enjoyable but elusive. Its purposeful lack of substance makes its memory a fleeting one. Songs such as “Mouth Full of Gravity,” do not ask to be judged, but merely enjoyed. This song is reminiscent of Squeeze’s “Up the Junction,” in its pop nature and the story of a hopeless couple and their trivial goals. However, the song lacks the humanity and bittersweet message that Squeeze is able to accomplish. The song merely lists off the goals of a modern couple (house, kids, etc.) without exploring a deeper message. The implications of this message seem overdone and the staleness of the track is apparently due to the album’s aesthetic approach.

The song “Is This Some Kind of Shoutdown?” is exemplary of Singh at his best. The song takes quick turns through spinning, pounding, melodic and straightforward, constantly engaging attention. It is a tune that truly abhors a dull moment. The song places the narrator, “Sipping bubbly and reading some lore,” at which point he is confronted by death in the form of an unwanted visitor. The song casts off any seriousness with lines such as, “Cause plagiarism’s a serious affair,” and, “Worst witching hour ever (ever, ever, ever).”

Heavy Metal Sunset happens in a quick 26 minutes that leaves one somewhat confused as to what just happened. It is like a happy brainwashing, or a romp through a room full of pillows. When one opens the CD and looks into the linear notes for explanation, they are greeted with three smiling plastic dolls on a rock by the sea. The dolls stare blankly from the paper, casting their shadow forward. This may be frightening at first, but when considered it is extremely relevant to the album. Behind their ever-vacant stare and unassuming smiles is a true appreciation of the heavy metal sunset that is happening behind them.

No related posts.

Tagged as: experimental pop, indie pop, Toronto

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.