Big City Life by SMERZ
#8
Great music. Deliriously lobotomized. “My IQ low and my shoe heels high.” But also… it’s so hypnotic? So psychedelic? I could melt into the shuffling, trip hop-flavored backing track of “But I do” for hours. Not a single track feels long enough, including the 5-minute “You got time and I got money.” That being said, I find it difficult to write about why this album works so well, because a lot of the appeal is just the vibe it exudes, making it feel immune to intellectualization.
It could all boil down to the instrumental decisions that this album makes. While being pretty minimal on the surface, a lot of the smaller details are very odd and surprising, but work perfectly. The somewhat dissonant string pizzicato of “Feisty” is a great example of that - it shouldn’t belong on a pop track, but also feels right at home here. The duo take a deadpan, somewhat wry approach to their vocal delivery (there’s definitely a hint of Coco & Clair Clair in there), and their lyrics are often nonsensical, giving the project a lot of humor. However, just when you start to get adjusted to the duo’s ironic tone, moments of awestriking beauty sneak up on you. The understated vocals and plucked instrumentation of “A thousand lies,” for example, are an absolutely gorgeous combination and make for the album’s most dreamlike track.
That being said, the song that really sells Big City Life, and the one on everyone’s minds, is the slow-burn love song “You got time and I got money.” There’s an analog ambience to the drums and bassline of this song that creates a gorgeous atmosphere along with the strings and hummed refrains. Again, the lyrics on this song can be bizarre at points, but sometimes they’re so earnest that they really work, even when straddling the romance of the song with the group’s inherent humor and irreverence (“Baby, can I see you naked? (please)/Even though I love how you dress”). While this track is certainly unique in the scheme of the album, it also epitomizes the balancing act the duo does that makes Big City Life so great: it feels both introverted and undeniably pop, both highbrow and lowbrow, and both silly and transcendental.