Basically true, that. And the more a song reminds me of myself, the more I’m willing to spend hours searching down every dead end on the Internet until I find it.
This afternoon I was listening to Barometer, which I do love, and this song I’d never heard came on. At first I thought it was Hello Saferide, then (rather ridiculously) Belle and Sebastian, but in each case I quickly realized I was wrong. Once I decided the artist was unfamiliar, I was willing to let it pass -- but it kept getting better and better, and soon enough, I found myself putting my sociology down (and that’s saying something; pretty much all I do any more is read sociology) and going to see what it was I was listening to. Turns out it’s a very new artist, which was once a girl-boy thing but is now just a girl, called SoKo. She’s from
I’ll Kill Her, which is the lead song from SoKo’s only EP, Not SoKute, is the perfect blend of singing and spoken-word vocals. (And her accent is wonderful.) As far as instrumentation goes, it’s just guitar, but it doesn’t seem bare at all. It’s just adorably twee -- even more so than Pelle Carlberg. Okay, way more so than Pelle Carlberg. SoKo is the twee-est thing I’ve ever seen. (And I’m not using the wrong sense here just because it rhymes. You can watch the videos -- both I’ll Kill Her and Souvenirs, which will hopefully be on the upcoming EP. Both appear to have been filmed live (I’ll Kill Her goes slightly differently in the video than the EP) and Souvenirs was filmed in a park and has birds chirping in the background.)
I’m having real trouble not using ‘adorable’ for every adjective in this write-up; it’s just so appropriate. Even the scariness of I’ll Kill Her’s lyrics does not decrease the appropriateness, because they’re just so good. ‘She’ll dump your ass for a model called Brendan’ -- how much better can you get? Granted, it doesn’t sound quite so good out of context -- or in writing -- but that’s just another excuse for you to make I’ll Kill Her yours and listen to it all the time.
As far as I know, I’ll Kill You is the only song you can download, but you can listen to three others on myspace. Other than that, I don’t know. Even if you do understand French, anything SoKo is rather hard to find. Their label, Overseas Rock, is so small it only has a myspace (where they describe the artist Little as a genetic mutation of an angel, a flower, and a ladybug (in French)), but you can buy the EP on iTunes. Make sure you only get the one called Not SoKute, though -- the other two albums are some other band.
Also -- getting the Hello Saferide link just now reminded me -- she has a new single (well, it's an old single -- The Quiz -- but the B-side is new) coming out in the UK, on Regal (Babyshambles' label! Also, unfortunately, the insufferable Lily Allen's label). It's out 14. May -- on 7" or for download, via iTunes, only -- no CDs. You can listen to the very nice B-side, I Was Definitely Made For These Times, on Regal's myspace. Regal also has this neat Hello Saferide quiz you can take to determine whether you'll like her music. It applauds when you answer the questions correctly; I'm not sure what it does if you mess up, because I got them all right.
--DL--I’ll Kill Her (SoKo)
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