Critic's evaluation
Just under two years after announcing their last full-length, Victims Of The New Math were quick to resume their studio activities. With only a single preceding its announcement, I'll Be Your Blue Sky was soon able to see the light of day. As well as being the direct successor to All That's Left Of My Intentions, the album is the band's fifth studio record.
Its beginning is already marked by a strangely comforting guitar riff which, due to its degree of pitch, already lends a melancholy aroma to the melody in the making, even if it is still early. Without delay and free of any brilliance, the introduction soon ends and leads the listener to the first verse, completed by lyrical tracks introduced by a voice that, coming from Thomas Young, parades a kind of synthetic and digitized acidity, as if under the effects of squeaks. This touch is even responsible for making the viewer realize that the song's melodic recipe, along with indie rock and alternative rock, has a touch of lo-fi. Numb in its mixed form of melancholy and nostalgia, We Go Round draws attention for its aesthetic rawness, which gives it a garage essence as one of its great strengths. Reflecting on life from a point of view of the absence of logic, We Go Round is an invitation to take a closer look at unpredictability, time and its influence on social routine. People are like a single body, illogical, unpredictable, almost conservative in its excessively accentuated normality.
Gradually revealing its sonority under the fade-in effect, the introduction works like a dawn with mystically crepuscular tones. Built under an intimate melodic body and relying solely on the harmony between voice and guitar, the song offers a kind of hypnotically nauseating sweetness. Growing in harmony in the post-chorus instrumental from the entry of a guitar with a muffled riff, Sleeping On Airplanes maintains its melodic linearity while offering a kind of analysis of a character running away, at all costs, from things that mess with his emotions. Turning away from a painful past, introverting to enormous levels and trying to understand unanswered questions. The listener may even sympathize with his anguish, after all, we all run away from something that hurts us. However, the beauty of Sleeping On Airplanes lies in the final verse, when the character finally understands that it's okay to suffer.
Contagious in its melancholically nauseating way, the new atmosphere is quick to pour out its Bittlenian influences with a touch of Britpop à la Oasis. In Number Twelve Everything, as well as being the moment when Young makes clear his tonal similarity to the timbre extracted from Whitfield Crane's voice, it's also the moment when the listener notices that he's out of tune, especially from the chorus onwards with the rise in pitch. Even so, Number Twelve Everything manages to be infectious in its strange melodic linearity, which serves as the basis for a sad, depressing and discouraging storyline. After all, in the track the character presents a discouraging self-analysis by calling himself an insignificant, worthless and communally rejected being.
Curiously, its awakening, from its first sonars, already demands a strange but successful affinity with the viewer. The song's touching tinkling of the tambourine is the element that adds a more sensitive and tactile texture to the melody, which remains in an undulating and melancholic line. From the moment a sweet and acid sonar is introduced into the melody from the keyboard, I Won't Brake Your Heart enters a short harmonic crescendo that ends with the appearance of a female backing vocal in the sound base, thus giving the song more softness and elegance. Like the first ballad on I Will Be Your Blue Sky, I Won't Brake Your Heart is a numbingly romantic track in which the character declares that the best thing in life is to love the person you're in love with.
There's no denying it. The way the guitar moves in the very first moments communicates a strong aesthetic similarity to the one created by John Lennon in Imagine, his respective single. Flowing from serene sweetness to something more synthetic, the sound ends up introducing slight touches of new wave into the song's melodic recipe. Even so, the sweetness offered by the keyboard ends up being the protagonist in the melody, even if the guitar maintains an infectious softness. With hints of indie rock flirting with alternative rock, By Ourselves initially seems to be another song on the album with a romantic slant. In fact, it talks about the need for faith as a way of seeing hope in tomorrow and the real possibility of a fresh start. A fresh start in which, from a sense of self-confidence, loneliness will be broken and a new focus on life will be drawn.
After the low, hollow drumbeats are heard in the distance, the guitar with its muffled, nauseating riff takes center stage next to the vocals. With slight touches of psychedelia, Into The Sun presents the percussive base backed by the gentle rattle of the caxixi and the timid tinkling of the tambourine as elements that deliver a sudden rationality to the melody. Into The Sun is a track that brings a surprising cry of rebellion from a character tired of being who he isn't, of trying to change what he can't change. Here, therefore, the sun appears as a kind of metaphor for intensity, daring and even dissatisfaction.
Dawning slowly and gradually, just as it did with Sleeping On Airplanes, the song presents a hypnotic aesthetic linearity in its introduction, which is graced by an insistent high-pitched sonar that gives the atmosphere slight sci-fi refinements. Embarrassing and amorphous, Radio Jets is where Young inserts more than one guitar to give even more weight to the melody's psychedelic bias. It's a great way to act as the non-verbal dialog of a song that is simply an ode to the invention of radio and the weight of music in people's lives. A real tribute to broadcasting and the possibility of communicating at a distance.
Fresh and adorably nostalgic, the melody is comfortingly inviting in its curiously sad and longing touch. Together with a high-pitched, sweet and tremulous sonor coming from the synthesizer, the sound of Can't Find My Way Back Home acts as a simple plea for a warm, protective embrace. Maternal. Counting on the tinkling of the tambourine as the only instrument to delimit the rhythmic base, Can't Find My Way Back Home, in the form of the longest song on I'll Be Your Blue Sky, is where the character exhorts his insecurities, his fears and his overwhelming need for protection. Maturing is a painful process that everyone goes through, some with more suffering and others with less. The truth is that, in both cases, the image of the house is a construct that symbolizes tranquillity, softness, affection and, above all, care.
Surprisingly, with a melody that curiously flirts vaguely with reggae, the album offers a joyful first song. Soft, smiling and contagious, The Sun Is Gonna Shine is a song in which Young tries to call the listener to action, to get them out of the doldrums, to make them realize that staying in the comfort zone of waiting and in the false belief that everything will work itself out will get you nowhere. That's why, in a joyfully daring way, The Sun Is Gonna Shine comes with the mission of encouraging risk-taking and taking advantage of the sunshine to break through the webs of sameness.
Didactically fresh, like the sea breeze making your hair waltz on a pleasant autumn afternoon with the sensation of damp sand under your bare feet, the new setting doesn't hide its romantic and cozy bias. As the work in which the guitar appears in a better executed undulation due to its visible sound maturity, Polaroid presents the listener with an infectious guitar solo embraced by a sweet and synthetic melodic base coming from the keyboard in a beautiful harmonic crescendo. With an undeniable Oasis influence in its aesthetic, Polaroid, with its overlapping vocals and the most well-crafted instrumental in the whole of I'll Be Your Blue Sky, is, even more so than I Won't Brake Your Heart, a truly romantic piece that seems to have received a deliberately different treatment from the other tracks on the album. After all, it is completely harmonic, well-equalized and with a more complete and daring instrumental. This is how Polaroid proves to be a profound and contagious declaration of love.
As a one-man album in terms of sound and composition, I Will Be Your Blue Sky says a lot about Thomas Young, the soul behind Victims Of The New Math. The material shows sensitivity and an undeniable boldness in offering songs that are too raw, leaving it up to the listener to dissect each element.
Although full of melodic sameness, seen in its dense sound linearities spread over its 10 chapters, the album is an interesting product for bringing aesthetic freedom in the midst of a combination of more radio-oriented structures. With a homely soul, the material invites the listener to wander through themes such as love, belonging, loneliness, longing, homage to broadcasting and long-distance communication and rebellion against the precepts of a certain behavioral conservatism
Even so, it is undeniable that the most striking themes, not necessarily the main ones, are the motivational point to break the doldrums, present in The Sun Is Gonna Shine, the penetrating and uncomfortable senses of smallness and insignificance in Number Twelve Everything, and the escape and denial of problems in Sleeping On Airplanes. Combined, these themes form the psyche of an individual who, courageously, has been completely dissected in I'll Be Your Blue Sky.
Therefore, to symbolize this emotional inconstancy, Young himself, now working on the production and mixing, fused musical genres such as lo-fi, sci-fi, alternative rock, indie rock, new wave, reggae and psychedelia as a way of representing everything from melancholic madness to the depths of passion.
Closing the technical part is the cover art. Signed by Sophie Tew and Kelly Young, it features a couple walking in a wooded park. Its sepia-blue tone gives the impression of the past, while observing the pair walking along a path with no visible end gives the idea of infinity, eternity. It's like a message that you can always start again.
Released on 01/23/2024 in an independent way, I'll Be Your Blue Sky is pure lyrical-aesthetic experimentalism. The boldest escape from commercial and conventional melodic parameters. A one-man album that dissects the soul of an individual who, like everyone else, deals with love, the weight of responsibilities and longing. But he never forgets that life is short and that we are the ones who make our own path towards countless new tomorrows.
