[dream-pop, synth-pop] (2019) Sorry Girls - Deborah [FLAC] [DarkA...

    Sorry Girls – Deborah (2019)

Review by Stuart Berman:
On their 2016 self-released debut EP, Awesome Secrets, Montreal duo Sorry Girls sounded like they were putting together an audition tape for the Bang Bang Bar. Heather Foster Kirkpatrick’s glowing voice conjured the ghosts of bygone ’60s girl-group singers, while partner Dylan Konrad Obront doused her torch-song serenades in ripples of country-noir guitar and a Badalamentian synth mist as thick as mountain fog. Their first full-length for Arbutus, Deborah, is likewise a fusion of luminous, eerily familiar melodies and obfuscating ambience. But here, Sorry Girls are less interested in capturing a specific nocturnal mood than in exploring the Rorschach-test ambiguity inherent to much synth-based pop music: that is, what some might consider ethereal, post-goth dream pop, others hear as lush, adult-contemporary soft rock. Just as the passage of time has obliterated the rigid aesthetic divisions that once governed pop music and replaced them with genre-agnostic, era-specific radio formats, Deborah imagines an alternate ’80s where 4AD went MOR, and Cocteau Twins shared Top 40 chart space with the Thompson Twins. The album’s directorial analog is more John Hughes than David Lynch, displacing Awesome Secrets’ earthier elements and uncanny atmosphere with soft-focus pleasures and heart-on-sleeve poignancy. Pretty much every song begins in ambient haze before fortifying into the sort of passionate, heartstring-tugging address that could soundtrack a pivotal scene in a seriocomic teen flick. And in true cineaste fashion, Sorry Girls construct their musical mise-en-scènes with an auteur’s eye for detail: Anyone can program a synth to sound like a hit single from 35 years ago, but a true connoisseur of the era recognizes that glassy acoustic guitars (“Something’s Gotta Give”) and breezy harmonica solos (“Under Cover”) were equally crucial components of the ’80s pop palette. And yet, for all of Sorry Girls’ unapologetic invocations of the past, Deborah rarely feels like an exercise in nostalgia—because all its shimmering surfaces can’t gloss over the distress stewing underneath. Kirkpatrick’s voice is both highly expressive and enigmatic: It veers in and out definition like a camera that just won’t auto-focus, echoing the feelings of indecision at the core of these shapeshifting songs. For all its sunrise-summoning optimism, “Waking Up” is really a plea for escape from an unfulfilling relationship (“Maybe I’m waking up to see the ways that I’ve been blinded/By the love that’s in my eyes/I want to send it all crashing down”), while the tropical chillwave of “Easier” sails into the sunset of a tryst as the parties involved lie to each other that “it never meant anything” to soothe their pain. But Deborah counters these portraits of disaffection with vigorous statements of self-determination, like the vogueing piano-house bop “H.O.N.E.S.T.Y.” And with “Give You Love,” Sorry Girls deliver a synth-sparkled affirmation that plays like a spiritual sequel to Robyn’s “Show Me Love,” with Kirkpatrick declaring her intentions in no uncertain terms. “I’m ready to be the one you need, I’m ready to be someone,” she sings to her potential partner—though the bold pop leaps taken on Deborah suggests she’s courting a potentially larger audience, too. — pitchfork

Track List:
01 - Waking Up
02 - One That You Want
03 - Dirty Laundry
04 - Under Cover
05 - Something’s Gotta Give
06 - Deborah
07 - Easier
08 - H.O.N.E.S.T.Y
09 - Give You Love
10 - Warm Heart


Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop, synth-pop
Origin: Montreal, Québec, Canada
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)


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