Copenhagen’s Kind of Girl specialise in bass heavy synth-pop doused in the sweet addictive vocal melodies of lead singer Sissel. Lonely in A Modern Way marks the debut album from a band bursting with ideas on combining rock, electro and atmospheric elements to write addictive and inspiring pop songs.
Sounds delicious. I first came to know of Kind of girl (I'm using the capitalization they seem to prefer: with lower case "of girl"), perhaps fittingly so, on Last.fm, when I was searching the site for free music downloads. A demo called Poetry Boy was there by them. I downloaded it - after all, what from Scandinavia do I not love?
[TANGENT: A selection of favorite bands/singers from Scandinavia: Poets of the Fall (Finland), The Cardigans (Sweden), Nina Persson/A Camp (of The Cardigans, thus Sweden), The Knife (Sweden), Kind of girl (Denmark), Jouhiorkesteri (Finland)]
I loved Poetry Boy, and the other downloadable demos they put up on Last.fm — Slave To Your Charm and You Can't Save Me. They lived on in my iTunes playlist until a few months later, when I saw that they had added more songs to their Lonely In A Modern Way album list.
Lonely In A Modern Way is one of my favorite albums — lead singer Sissel's voice comes up fantastically and carries a huge amount of personality. The lyrics are almost too simple: I asked my sister Roslyn to review the lyrics of The More (the chorus of which goes something like, "The more that I love you/the more I love you" repeated about a couple of dozen times).
The two best songs in that album, Someone You Replaced and The More, are probably the best examples of this overly simple lyrics, used to maximum dramatic effect. There's something about Someone You Replaced, especially, with the music gradually building up for a climax that doesn't quite happen - the chorus mellows down towards the end, like the stumble in the relationship sung about. ("It's all I can see/You don't want me/It's all over me/You don't need me/It's all I'll ever be/Someone you replaced...")
Yet the lyrics in the verse for Someone You Replaced work magnificently because of its simplicity. Consider:
"You used to say/The sweetest way/My lips were red, delicious/
The more you charm me/I admit, the less I was suspicious/"
— Kind of girl - Someone You Replaced
I don't think I've ever seen lyrics so poignantly effective before. You'll have to listen to the music to get what I'm talking at. Have a listen on their Myspace or their website to understand what I'm getting at. Or... listen to Someone You Replaced and The More here!
The More is equally lyric-beautiful, if you count on simplicity:
"That's the way love goes/You suffer, you drown/
You shouldn't survive it, and I'm going down/"
— Kind of girl - The More
There's something haunting about that song that I can't put a finger on, but I find it works so well — it's stuck in my head now, and I'm just playing it over and over again, even right now, as I write this article. I've not been able to get ahold of their second CD, Petit Fours, but some of the songs in there that I've listened to ((http://www.kind-of-girl.com has a great embedded browser player, if you'd like to hear the songs. Buy it, too. Seriously.)), like C'mon C'mon, I've liked too.
They've cemented a place in my favorite music list, and I've even posted occasional comments to them on Last.fm — in short, they're a nice, sweet, great group, with nice, sweet, great music. I'd love to see them live, too. Come to Malaysia!
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