BEST NEW MUSIC: SYML - TAKE ME APART

I’m feeling lost and alone. Like nothing I do in this world matters and it’s all some hopeless effort to connect me to a universe I don’t feel very strongly about connecting to. 

Okay, I don’t exactly feel that per say, but good music is meant to share its emotions-- to make the listener feel like they’re present in the skin of the songwriters head. SYML’s “Take Me Apart” does this brilliantly, with an array of deep, heart-wrenching feelings at work. We’re meant to feel every last one of them, and I tell you without question that we at We Are: The Guard are feeling them alright.

Someone much smarter than me once referred to music as the art of time, instead of space.  But I think that’s missing a key factor to really properly get that idea across. 

Maybe: Time + Emotion = Music. That’s more like it. If that’s the case then the visual equivalent of this one is something along the lines of a lonely lake, clouds coming in, and a man alone on a boat. Sure it’s not garnering attention in a museum-like some abstract expressionist, but it definitely gets its feelings across. And that… feels like the point.

SYML  - TAKE ME APART

This piano ballad builds out of a simple repetitive set of chords toward a flash of production. What feels like something that’s destined to remain simple goes somewhere else entirely by the end of the tune. A crescendo of feeling.

SYML’s voice leads the charge but makes room for violin vibrato and a production hit in the last act that turns this one into a maelstrom of despair. This ain’t your stagnant, well-worn piano ballad. No, no. SYML taps into every trick in the book, while simultaneously accepting its more simplistic nature, letting his songwriting take precedence over everything else.

By the time the drumbeat hits and the song derails into lo-fi glitch, it all comes together into one cohesive genre-spanning idea that feels like the inevitable conclusion to this building emotive expression. 

We’re touched. Earnestly. And as a jaded music critic, that’s pretty hard to do.

From deep within the murky depths of the Los Angeles River emerged a creature: 50% raver, 50% comedian, 10% Robotcop. Kurt Kroeber doesn’t own a dog, operates Soundbleed (the world’s only dance party comedy talk show rave), and is down to party with you. Come up some time and say “Hey dude!” But definitely make sure to casually drop the secret Illuminati password.