Tag: Sandro Cavazza

Sandro Cavazza – Enemy

“Sounds good, but let’s keep it below three and a half minutes please.”

Tim: I have a few podcasts on my phone that I’m several months behind on, and so I typically play them at at least 1.2x speed.

Tom: Only 1.2x? I used to listen to podcasts at 1.5 way back, and now basically everything I watch on YouTube is going at 2x.

Tim: Oh, well get you and your speedy brain. Anyway this sounds kind of like that.

Tim: Admittedly, YouTube’s next lower speed option, 0.75x, sounds too slow, but it does feel a little sped up, no?

Tom: See, if you hadn’t mentioned it to me, I would probably have just thought “that’s a bit jaunty”, but you’re right. It’s most noticeable at 1:50: that transition is just a bit too fast.

There is a custom speed option in those settings, incidentally: the quality’s not as good if you do that, but I’ll tell you that at 0.9x it just sounds like a mediocre Ed Sheeran album track. That speed difference perks it up.

Tim: I don’t mind, really, but I do get the feeling that a Universal exec heard a four minute track and said “sounds good, but let’s keep it below three and a half minutes please”. It’s good, though, and I like it.

Tom: There’s a weird genre of YouTube called “nightcore” where someone takes a regular song, speeds it up — without pitch correction, so it sounds higher too — and… well, that’s it. That’s the whole thing. In the same way that televisions in shops have their brightness and colour turned up to maximum to ‘look better’ while people are deciding on them, accelerating a song can make it seem… well, not better, but certainly more interesting, at least for a while. Perhaps that’s what’s happened here.

Tim: The speed does work, as we get through plenty of good stuff in a fairly short amount of time, and it’s got a decent melody, vocal, and all that lot. Nice. Fast, and nice.

Sandro Cavazza – Here

“It’d be absolutely perfect for the closing emotional scene montage of a CW teen drama.”

Tim: Sandro has his back to the camera in this shot, which is a sad waste of a rather quite lovely face, but we can look at his last video for that – you may remember it, it got a little bit raunchy at points. This is veering away from the banjo and whistling entirely, in favour of something a little less chirpy.

Tom: I am simultaneously pleased and disappointed, which I didn’t think was possible.

Tim: Well, just wait until you hear the song.

Tom: I was about to say “that’s a slow dirge”, and then the first line of the chorus kicked in, and I liked it, and that confused me.

Tim: I’m similar, and it’s interesting because I’m not sure I’ve had this particular reaction to any other song: it’s both really quite a bit boring and simultaneously absolutely lovely to listen to, and I’m not sure what I think of that. It’s a nice melody, presented well, and those drum builds are all well and good – but they also make me think he thinks it’s significantly more interesting and varied that it actually is.

Tom: There are so many good parts in here, it’s a shame they don’t seem to make a coherent whole.

Tim: So it’s kind of nice as a backing track to something (it’d be absolutely perfect for the closing emotional scene montage of a CW teen drama), I’m not sure I’d choose to listen to it. Though I might Shazam it.

Tom: Harsh but fair.

Sandro Cavazza – High With Somebody

“A video that’s really quite delightful.”

Tim: Last heard of providing vocals for Avicii, Sandro’s brought up a new solo song and with it a video that’s really quite delightful.

Tim: Every time a three minute (ish) song comes along, particularly at this time of year, I find myself wondering if it’d make a good Eurovision track. Here, of course: no. Well, unless they could get the guy in the rabbit suit up on stage doing stuff that would, let’s face it, probably bring the EBU into disrepute, so best not try.

Instead, let’s just enjoy the song, and even more enjoy the video – I’n fairly sure, after all, that that’s what we’re meant to do.

Tom: And I do enjoy it: but without it, I’m really not sure I’d think the song was any good. You’re right when you say it’s a delightful video; it’s just for a song that would be irritatingly chirpy otherwise.

Tim: Yep, that’s pretty much my feeling as well: fairly sure I wouldn’t enjoy the song anywhere near as much as I do if the video wasn’t there – I may well dismiss is as some twee waste of three decent minutes – but since the video is there, and I saw that before just hearing the song on its own, I’m all happy. And irritatingly chirpy.