Charlotte Qvale – Turn On The Light

“It’s a stylistic choice that makes perfect sense.”

Tim: Fun thing: the artwork for this looks exactly like the music sounds.

Tim: So, yes, eighties stuff. For me, though, it’s not the instruments, or the vocal effects, or rather, obviously it’s both of those things but nowhere near as much as something else: the volume levels. Unlike pretty much every current-sounding song made in the last thirty years, there’s no big volume jump between the verse and chorus, nor much in the way of excitement build.

Sure, the syllables double in frequency, but her vocal volume remains level and there’s not much of a boost in the instrumentation either. And that’s not a bad thing – it’s a stylistic choice that makes perfect sense, and works really really well when combined with everything else here. Music’s pretty good, production’s faultless.

Saturday Flashback: Charlotte Qvale – The Beginning of the End

“I couldn’t bring myself to look away from the video”

Tom: I think I first heard this while boarding a plane back from Norway at the start of this year.

Tim: I found myself quite thirsty just after the video started, but I couldn’t bring myself to look away from the video – it’s lovely, it really is.

Tom: Well, that’s a strange compliment. I can’t work out whether that odd, staccato instrumentation is an actual electric guitar, or a synth. Either way, it’s a brilliant riff, and it’s stuck with me, for some reason.

Tim: The vocals are lovely, the production is suitably deep and layered, and it all combines to make a track that, for me at least, manages to be pleasant and entertaining without getting stuck in my head on repeat.

Tom: Yeah, it is very nice. It reminds me of Still Alive, the theme from the game Mirror’s Edge – not musically, or lyrically, or stylistically, or really in any way to do with the song, but I think it’s because the best way to describe that, too, is ‘lovely’. And this is as well.