On first listen, Airhead DC’s “Honey-Colored Flame Blown Off My Candle” sounds like a simple enough swing at mid-90s alt-rock tributism, but the more I listen to it, the less simple it becomes.
Songwriter Vishal Narang has been making spacious, electronic, alternative rock for years under a variety of monikers including Milk Ghost and Nirvanus. Some iterations are more noisy and impenetrable, others are driving and wild, and others are distant and almost drone-like. “Honey-Colored Flame…” though, is as surprisingly catchy as it is experimental.
The track hinges on an earworm chorus that can be expected to remain in my head for a full week or more–a simple lyrical line (“How could I have realized?”) doubled by a sweet keyboard and underscored by unobtrusively distorted power chords. And the song’s subject material, though complicated by Vishal’s creative imagery, is fairly simple and it’s mild angst suits the song’s instrumental.
Vishal’s delivery of the melody and the lyrics are perfectly imperfect. He slurs the littlest bit and slides around from pitch to pitch rather than landing precisely on each one. Another little thing that multiplies the overall effect. All of the elements together evoke shoegaze and noise pop in the vein of Built To Spill and Yo La Tengo.
“Honey-Colored Flame” is a catchy tune and the tone is just right all around.
But it would be too simple for the song to just be a straightforward, 3 chord, unrequited love song. We can’t have that, so Airhead DC delivers a whole bunch of noise throughout the track to muck it up a bit. Whining feedback and static sweep back and forth through the verses and the song’s outro is a series of chimes and radar sweeps that sound like they are coming through an underwater speaker.
span style=”font-weight: 400;”>But just adding some interference to the mix doesn’t quite finish the job. The real trick Airhead DC is able to pull off is the creative guitar work and the song’s evolution. The song’s chorus-y backing guitar and power chords help to set up the first verse and chorus as pretty straightforward, but almost suddenly, the guitar chords become very tonally complex and almost sour. Vishal’s voice follows suit as the guitars drop out and he begins to sing with a bit less regard for the tuning. At the same moment the chimes are added and create a similar dissonance.
It all starts so predictable and approachable, but the song quickly becomes a bit alienating and strange.
The song’s semi-repetitiveness and de-evolution seem to mirror its lyrics when Vishal sings “Think I might consider death if this shit keeps happening to me.” It’s a gradual, difficult realization that things are going sour and that the same old patterns are becoming more and more wrong. It’s an interesting example of songwriting expressed through both music and words and of songwriting perhaps expressing something about the artist and creative motivation in general.
It is one of the most approachable tracks to be found in Vishal Narang’s various projects, after all, but it doesn’t sacrifice anything for that accessibility, it’s just a little cleaner and a little different. Maybe it takes a small change to keep things from going sour and to keep the creativity and the experimentation fresh.
