A Mercenary With Perfume

Chicano Batman “Pink Elephant”

The main guitar hook in “Pink Elephant” is played by Chicano Batman but presented like a sample, as if it’s mixed with quotation marks around it and moved off to the side from the persussion groove. This trick in making a band sound more adjacent to hip-hop goes back to the late ’90s, but this doesn’t necessarily feel like a trick so much just how the band has internalized a sense of “good production” going back to their childhoods. You could definitely have recorded this song with more depth and warmth, but the feel of this relies a lot on the beat sounding thin and the guitar part seeming choppy and a little too trebly. It’s crucial to the ambiance, and any implied nostalgia is tied up in second-hand uses of sounds rather than full fidelity.

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