Princess Nokia’s excellent/confusing new mixtape A Girl Cried Red has just gotten a little stranger.
While it looked like we had a bit of a roll running with the one-two punch of “Your Eyes Are Bleeding” and “For The Night,” in which the videos were telling a sequential story arc and suggested that we were being led somewhere (though exactly where remained to be confirmed), the next track “Look Up Kid” completely forgets that Frasqueri last left us looking out at the snow and instead drops her into… err… a garage band rehearsal space.
A mate of mine used to swear blind that Eddie Vedder was hands down the best lip-sync singer of all time, citing the “Jeremy” video as proof. Even if this is true, that fact doesn’t make the music Vedder was pretending to sing any less shit though.
The inverse is true here.
At least to our ears, Princess Nokia is new to this “real instruments” caper and isn’t convincing anyone otherwise here with the flagrant disregard pretending that she’s actually using that microphone to sing into, but the tune stacks up. Here we have an actual band, ostensibly playing actual music, and it’s relatable because we’ve all been in garages where the guitarist is loving his moves as much as this dude, and we’ve all seen bands where the drummer is a dorky ring in with a neck beard.
“Look Up Kid” is the first of the singles from A Girl Cried Red to completely break from the Princess Nokia of old — there isn’t a drum machine or sample in sight here — so the abandonment of the story arc that was being set up with the first two singles could be deliberate or perhaps simply symptomatic of the half-reach of A Girl Cried Red itself.
I’d still listen to this over Pearl Jam any day though.
Princess Nokia tour:
05.25.18 - Barcelona, Spain - Razzmatazz
05.26.18 - Madrid, Spain - Tomasvistas Festival
05.27.18 - A Coruna, Spain - Inn Club
05.31.18 - Athens, Greece - Piraeus 117 Academy
06.01.18 - Copenhagen, Denmark - Distortion Festival
06.02.18 - London, UK - Field Day Festival
06.05.18 - Mexico City, Mexico - Foro Indie Rocks
06.08.18 - Chicago, IL - House of Vans
06.16.18 - Oakland, CA - Feels (Art & Music Exhibition)
06.29.18 - Detroit, MI - Museum of Contemporary Art
07.07.18 - Turku, Finland - Ruisrock
07.08.18 - Zamardi, Hungary - Balaton Sound Festival
07.13.18 - Dublin, Ireland - Longitude Festival
07.14.18 - Dour, Belguim - Dour Festival
07.15.18 - Berlin, Germany - MELT Festival
07.19.18 - Benicassim, Spain - Benicassim Festival
07.20.18 - Lisbon, Portugal - Super Bock Festival
07.21.18 - Seyðisfjörður, Iceland - LungA Art Festival
08.18.18 - Hamburg, Germany - Dockville Festival
08.20.18 - London, UK - O2 Forum
08.21.18 - Leeds, UK - Belgrave Music Hall
09.29.18 - Long Beach, CA - Music Tastes Good Festival
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