A Remarkable Rewind to the Flavorful Glitter of 1980s Dance-pop
Australian Jordan Feller and Southern Californian Marc Gilfry came together in 2016 in order to form the electronic duo they now are as one, NEIL FRANCES. They’re not new to retro synth-pop, and the most potent flavor of music to them seems to be what blared on the airwaves back in the 1980s. While there may be no one whose name actually is Neil Frances, he’s floating around in bubbles of the industry like a specter of sorts, these two have managed to craft a character who appears to possess a penchant for channeling a slice of the spirit of dance music that some might’ve mistakenly believed to be dead.
It’s All a Bit Fuzzy is NEIL FRANCES’ newest release. It’s an album with a short runtime, coming in at only just over twenty-nine minutes. With but ten tracks, all of them muscular in their own ways, this duo works with a lot, even though there seems to be this metaphysical clock looming over it all, ready to usher in an abrupt ending. These songs have personalities to them—some that listeners get to know profusely, others that are maybe a bit too shy in revealing themselves fully. Nevertheless, all are warmly yet perhaps just a tad dancy, playing with sounds in manners priorly unseen.
Beginning with the features, It’s All a Bit Fuzzy has got a few. DRAMA’s vocalist-songwriter, Via Rosa, lends her striking cadence to the energy of “Energy.” She’s groovily playful on the track, singing about the levels of the vibes and such. St. Panther, rising producer and multi-instrumentalist, steals the show on two occasions. On “Head Straight,” she animatedly drawls on like a robot dealing with an irrepressible sugar rush and helps the themes of freedom really come across. Then she returns later for “Let’s Break It Down,” which truly is a track that’ll likely make one want to get down and jive, and gets a spotlight for her vocals to come through completely. Play it as you work out in the gym for best results.
“Gimme” and “She’s Just the Type of Girl” are stand-outs. They both seem to be odes to beings who are strangers to the audience. The former feels like an epistolary piece addressing money itself. NEIL FRANCES muse on and on about being given that slangy “bag” holding cash but nothing else. It could become quite the anthem for hustlers wanting to spend a night out on the dance floor. Savory synthesizers serve as the main source of noise throughout this one’s break. The latter, then, feels like a jam that could’ve played with mass success in the eighties. Perhaps NEIL FRANCES traveled back in time to pluck it from the past and bring it to the present, because it has that electronic drum-beat characteristic of what so much sounded like so long ago. “I wanna love her till the day I die,” one of this one’s lines, definitely assists in solidifying the track as poetic. Additionally, the continuous rise and fall of the vocals heard almost perfectly captures the warm feelings needed so that sincerity might have a place, so to say, and that’s the case here, of course.
Apparent are several stylistic decisions made for the sake of making the instruments feel instrumental in granting It’s All a Bit Fuzzy some kind of honorable distinction. Twittering birds quietly go on to do their thing in the background of “Some Kind of Static.” Also there’s an unmissable trumpet-like sound, giving the overall music a strobe-light effect. As for more information about the album’s lyrics, on this track they are colorfully cosmic, since they detail what might be living on the stars of the galaxy.
The song named after the album itself, its opener, contains crashes of sound; they’re like waves coming to shore, but instead now are melodies arriving in the ears. In that way, it’s fuzzily warm, which certainly is hard to pull off with the boring voice that mumbles as if it’s attempting to summon something. All in all, the interplay between the lyrics and instrumentations is promisingly tasty, like a cool glass of orange juice serving as a supreme refresher to a rather delicious breakfast of eggs, bacon and sausages.
It’s All a Bit Fuzzy has synthesizers galore, some of which are reminiscent of those used for songs as iconic as Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” As has been said, the instrumentation utilized and experimented with might just be the strongest feature of the entire album. Not many other artists can make pleasing what sounds like someone’s blowing through a straw, but that’s just what NEIL FRANCES does on “Standing My Ground.” “Bye Bye Bye” is a delightful sign-off to everything, but by its end it’d be no surprise to hear the collective groan of fans who just want a little more fun from this duo. Is that too tall an order?
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