Wildcat Apollo is releasing 80s pop singles on us right now. Truly, we’ve been living in this time of all past eras of music being re-done and reproached by the contemporary kids as good as or better than they were originally were for a while, and Wildcat Apollo’s second single from their new album “Melt into the Ocean” is exactly that. It’s a Cocteau Twins influenced blast of a romantic pop track, but with the echoing choir indie thing of the early 2000s (itself a rehash of an 80s Paul McCartney kinda thing that itself goes back even further etc.) and a very 2016 approach to old sounds that says this is ours, and we’re gonna take it and make it like we want.
We live in the age of fast-moving everything, and one thing that’s moving so fast that it’s collapsed into itself is pop music, which has developed into music like “Red Roses” that comes off as a kind of retro-contemporary-future pop music all at one time. It’s weird that it does all these different pop things at once and doesn’t ask permission to do it. It might not be fully what many might want from pop music if we were asked to directly lay out the path we think good such music takes, and it isn’t perfect with its almost-too cutesy notes with the echoing choir shit, but it makes up for it by not caring that you might not like that and driving hard at everything the band wants the track to be. It ends up pretty endearingly done, and the track sticks in your head and gets your spirit going a bit upwards whether you’d like to admit it or not (and many will without a single problem).
Wildcat Apollo’s “Red Roses” is of the new rules pop, and it’s good fun, and you should and can listen to it below. Do that or be a stickler, hip kids of this site.