Review Summary: People tell me I’m not strong—I can’t seem to find the right charge
The naive whimsy of Philharmony is a pillow under something wholly more uneasy, wrapped in the clinical, sanitised hope of retro-futurism; that comfort and convenience will become the bastions of modern society. It at first seems like the blissfully unaware wonderings of an innocent child, the toying with words that sound funny, like picnic, pic-pic-pic-pic-picnic, but there’s a dread sewn into the sampler. The wonderings wander. The cute, saccharine arpeggios veer towards a slight dissonance, the sort where you know something is wrong but you can’t figure out what exactly. Why do I feel queasy?
The back-and-forth between heady pop and tense instrumental keeps this uncertainty looming like a caged off intrusive thought, and
Luminescent / Hotaru is perhaps the finest example of the two moods meeting. Staccato mallet instruments rise and fall in layers, as though an introduction to musical notes and how they relate to one another, spirited until ripples of white noise and spectral reversed vocals interrupt, carpeted by deep, tense tones that can permeate a stomach.
Living - Dining - Kitchen plays out like a cheesy infomercial: “Standing in the kitchen / Can’t think what to eat / I have to make my mind up / Cup Noodles or Big Mac?” The exciting banalities of modern life. But there’s fear here, even if at a molecular level, made apparent by the lulling bounce between pop song and eerie experimentation, masked by the delighted chaos of arpeggio.
Birthday Party follows, immediately distant from the jubilance of one. A catalogue of noises, wails, breaths and bells give way to tired, bored utterances of “happy birthday”, and the youthful fascination that opens the album feels unreachably distant.
So much so, that by the time the prototypical pop of
Sports Men comes around, it’s a relief to slosh in the squalor of dejection and inadequacy. With the world hurtling towards a digital age and with the parameters of excellence rising constantly, it’s just quite nice to be able to cede to one’s owns defects. “People tell me I’m not strong,” Harry pouts. “I can’t seem to find the right charge.” The synth melodies are insistent, the drums encouraging, and as the world around us twitches and throbs towards the pointless endeavour of striving for perfection, we play along.
The glassy-eyed nature of the album’s beginning is once again trumpeted with the title track. And what has seemed so far to be perhaps disjointed, random, aimless—suddenly isn’t. It’s not carved in stone that anyone has to succumb to the cankers of cognisance. We don’t have to lose the awe with which we look at the world. I feel queasy. Isn’t it brilliant?
