Review Summary: Baby, meet bathwater.
For the past month or so, I have been
obsessed with Little Majorette’s “Not Mine”. As far as post-disco synth-pop bangers go, I'm frankly not sure you can find much better. That four-on-the-floor backbeat pulsates with a vitality and magic that recalls ABBA at their most swooningly romantic. The sleek, glittering synth lines build fluidly throughout the song, always restrained while still ultimately adding up to a soaring pop maximalism. It sounds crisp and shiny and impossibly attractive; more or less everything I’ve ever wanted dance music to be.
However, at the center of it all is singer and lyricist Zoe Durrant, and she takes the song far beyond the immaculate, stylish pastiche it already was. “Not Mine” is, at least nominally, “upbeat”, but it’s far from happy or escapist. The lyrics here address an estrangement from oneself, feeling at a distance from not only other people, but from your own thoughts and feelings. What makes it so affecting to me is that it isn’t really about overcoming anything. It isn’t about moving past some fugue of self-doubt and depersonalization. It’s just about contending with those feelings- wounds scarring over and learning to live with those scars. Yes, there are glimmers of optimism, a sense that the narrator’s struggles are surmountable, but ultimately the song’s mere existence, that these feeling are being spoken (or sung) aloud, is the small, perhaps even trivial, victory that prevents it from being swallowed by hopelessness. Perhaps tomorrow Durrant with return to feeling isolated and detached and unlike herself, but right now she is singing to us about how she feels. The song’s subject matter makes the very act of writing and performing it meaningful in and of itself, in a way the rest of the song seems to acknowledge musically. Also her voice is just absolutely beautiful, and the way she sighs into the pre-chorus over that major lift is the most awe-struck I’ve been by a musical moment all year.
About a week after I came across “Not Mine” and bought it on Bandcamp, Little Majorette released the EP
Waves, which opens with “Not Mine”. The following three tracks are perfectly adequate indie-pop and nothing more. They point in a similar general direction to the shining success that is “Not Mine”, but in their own ways, all three fail in small, subtle ways to capture that same lightning in a bottle. Case in point: A similarly hard-edged 4/4 rhythm fuels “Les Chasseurs et les Cueilleurs”, the other advance single off the EP, but rather than the strutting, R&B-indebted groove of the discotheque, it’s far more indebted to the sugary rave-ups of early-teens festival EDM, and the hesitant romance of the lyrics ends up feeling like an afterthought rather than the focal point, stuck playing second fiddle to big, empty hooks and overworked vocal chopping. Sure, it’s catchy enough, and it could slot comfortably into any number of DJ playlists, but there’s just not much substance underneath the sparkle.
On the other hand, “Modern Ones” and “Dear Satellite” both feel like overcorrections, a hard pivot away from danceable synth-pop into more graven, heady territory. It’s easy to see why neither became a single. “Modern Ones” strips back the instrumentation to its most barebones to let Durrant’s voice take center stage. She’s a compelling enough performer to keep the track listenable, but producer/co-writer Peter Agren seems far less comfortable in a minimalist mode, and you can almost hear him struggling to hold back from making that chorus erupt the way he wants it to, contenting himself with listless keyboard twinkles and haphazard smudges of reverb over Durrant’s voice. Though it strikes at the same sense of melancholy as “Not Mine”, the lyrical subject matter- vague hand-wringing about Intimacy In The Modern Era- leaves it far more dour, neither particularly incisive nor sensual, and the song is rather poorly served by spotlighting those lyrics the way Agren and Durrant do here. “Dear Satellite” comes much closer to genuine success, with a shimmery, shoegaze-y atmosphere and tumbling percussion, not to mention a pretty striking turn of phrase in “your rebel tornado hurricane mind”. It’s also where another of the EP’s shortcomings becomes most obvious: Durrant seems intent on writing about relationships, but as a lyricist she’s miles better at articulating internal turmoil. She’s acutely aware of her subjects’ emotional states, and even more so of her own, but it’s the chasm between the two that she has to settle for outlining in such basic and uncompelling terms. “I need your communication”, indeed.
So, what to make of
Waves? To what extent does its one towering achievement define it, as opposed to its three relative misfires? Are Durrant and Agren unremarkable songwriters who happened to stumble onto an idea that sidestepped all their weaknesses? Or are they a talented lyricist/producer duo who simply made a few easy-to-miss stumbles trying to combine their skills harmoniously? I don’t have a definitive answer here, and to be perfectly honest I don’t really care. Little Majorette delivered what will almost certainly be my favorite song of 2021, and even if I don’t plan of revisiting the rest of this EP anytime soon, they certainly made for interesting points of comparison, and a reminder that unequivocally great music needn’t come from unequivocally great albums.
