Hazel English – Wake UP! review

arcticreviewsblog,

What if this all a Soma dream? Hazel English spent her youth writing poetry before coming across Guy Debord’s Situationist bible The Society of the Spectacle, a still prescient book which set out amongst other things the theory that pretty much everything we participate in is an invention of the establishment to take out minds off the horror of reality.

Wake UP! is an exhortation to herself amongst the rubble to ignore the 25 hour demands of modern life, to unplug from it’s grid and avoid becoming one of the mass of slumbering human nodes, like the zombiefied mask wearers in Simon Stålenhag’s retro-futurist classic The Electric State.

This absolutely doesn’t sound like a recipe for music gold, but using the sixties as a vessel – girl groups, West Coast pop, The Beach Boys – English tackles very modern issues such as disjointed relationships, insecurity and lust under a veneer of superlative, tingling kitsch.  At it’s peak with Off My Mind, Combat and the sugary heaven of Like A Drug, Wake Up! is potent enough to give genre veterans Beach House a very good run for their money. If it’s a dream, it’s one you should be having.

Read the full review here.

Published by arcticreviewsblog

Hi, my name is Andy & I live in Leeds, in northern England. I've been writing about music for more than ten years. My work outside of this blog is featured on Live4ever and Contact Music.