Tim: This came in via e-mail recently; Kadie Elder is a band, and to be more specific a synthy electropop Dutch one.
Tom: Well, I’ve heard less promising introductions.
Tim: You can probably guess this from the title, but the e-mail states that this track is “about recognizing your sexuality in a young age and the difficulties that can follow”.
Tim: And there we go. Quite a nice track, isn’t it?
Tom: I… guess? The chorus is pleasant, but the whole thing just seems a bit cold: the vocals are buried in the mix, hard to make out, and the instruments just aren’t quite entertaining enough to take centre stage.
Tim: The video is…hard to describe because I’m not really sure if I think it’s moving or a little bit mawkish, though I suspect you’ll lean towards the latter.
Tom: You’re absolutely right: mawkish. It’s possible to pull off Deep Emotional Videos With A Message (again, Pink’s Perfect comes to mind) but this is just by-the-numbers and… well, dull.
Tim: It’s certainly entirely predictable, which spoils it somewhat but never mind. Musically it’s nice to hear – the lyrics, hard as they occasionally are to make out, tell the picture a lot better than the video does, with lines like “keeping back the ghost inside”, “cover up is what they told”, though oddly they never move on to the happy place that the video ends up at. So as far as downbeat synth pop tracks go? I like it a lot.
Tom: Yep, as far as downbeat synth pop goes, it’ll do. I just don’t particularly like downbeat synth pop.