Either Way This Is A Losing Fight

Katy Rose “Sloth” – The ironic thing is that Katy Rose was originally marketed as an alternative to modern dance pop, but when she got her artistic independence, she went out and made a bunch of songs that are like warped, unsettling versions of Britney Spears et al circa the first couple years of this decade. Like a lot of pop songs from this decade, “Sloth” is sexual but not quite sexy, but that’s on purpose — it’s supposed to sound tarted-up yet sickly and zoned out. It’s a song about uncomfortable feelings, or the discomfort of not quite feeling your feelings the way you think they ought to be felt, and trying to make sense of the difference. The synthesizers in this track are brilliant — it sounds as if the funky hooks are giving the woozy, dizzy textures an awkward, nervous lap dance at some seedy club. (Click here to buy it from CD Baby.)

No Kids “For Halloween” – The basic sentiment of this song is sort of mundane — he’s lonely and depressed because someone special has left him — but the careful, vivid details in the lyrics and the band’s gentle, nuanced arrangement combine to create a very well-observed portrait of a man stumbling through a period of quiet, low-grade misery. There’s a shot of pure self-pitying melancholy in there, but it is diluted by comfort and the knowledge that things will inevitably get better, or at least change. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I get the sense that on some level, this is a song about easing into more mature forms of depression — you get older, you get some perspective on things, and then you can’t really rationalize these dramatic young emotions anymore, but you still want that purity of feeling, but all you can muster is this watered-down grown-up bullshit, and even though it’s more functional and reasonable, you feel a little bit cheated. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)