Critic's evaluation
Since 2011, he has been one of the five members of the a cappella group Pentatonix. Now, Texan singer Scott Hoying has decided to take the plunge into a solo career and announces his first EP. Entitled Parallel, the material was recorded in the Californian city of Los Angeles during the year 2022.
The setting is enigmatic, but with sweet aromas and even dulled by fogs of pinkish hues that give it a mystical character. After a high-pitched howl is heard filling the atmosphere, a dry syncopated beat shapes the rhythm while a deep voice takes the melodic foreground. It's Scott Hoying delivering dramatically sensual touches to the title track, a work filled with peaks of vocal extension that, under the pop regime, sounds like a b-side song from the catalog of boybands like Backstreet Boys and One Directrion. In the form of a romantic song in which the character describes how he feels next to his beloved, the title track is catchy in its lyrical melody and politely sexy in the way it brings the intensity of the passion felt towards the other.
A harmonic melodic pop born through electronic sonars gives an artificial but contagious dawn to the new set. With the help of the guitar sonar, the melody, together with the beat, becomes contagiously colorful like the first kiss or the first meeting. Sweet, mellow and with a catchy radio pop feel, Extraordinary manages to overcome the popular appeal of the title track while following through with a romantically adolescent lyricism.
It's like imagining yourself in the universe of Alice in Wonderland. While a deep voice emerges in the silence of the darkness with a song based on melismas under a cadence that gives it a mixture of R&B and soul, vocal overlays are inserted, amplifying the echo and the notion of dense psychedelia. With a more cadenced and slightly accelerated beat, a flirtation of Bruno Mars influence can be perceived, while aesthetic similarities to songs created by Imagine Dragons give a slightly electronic flavor with their inclination towards techno. Invitingly danceable, King Kong features a Scott Hoying with a sense of power and invincibility. Intensity and a deliriously sensual, energetic pull are part of the lyrical storyline of this song made for the dance floor.
In the molds of R&B, Hoying appears in a vocal watered between falsetto and melismas, while backed by the drama of the piano. Embraced by rhymes and a context in which he presents himself melodramatically, the singer is accompanied by vocal overlays that amplify the harmony of Four, a romantically melancholic track in which the beginning of a relationship is recalled to then understand the present. It is the narrative of the path of love, partnership, synchrony, rapport, friendship, companionship. Four is the understanding of yesterday, the perception of today and the realization of tomorrow metaphorized by a step further in the relationship. Touching for its plot in the form of a declaration of love, Four can move even the most brutalized hearts.
A surprised and inconsolate cry is heard in the distance as if it were occurring in some corridor after receiving bad news. When the velvety piano notes, as if it were the representation of the fender rhodes, enters with a wavering and comforting movement, one realizes an intense, but at the same time melodic, dramatic and visceral touches interpretation by Hoying. No wonder that Bubs, a perfect antithesis of Four, is a song of loss that brings the vocalist dealing, in addition to the mourning itself, with disillusionment, disappointment and the feeling of being betrayed by life when seeing his soul mate leaving for another dimension, leaving only the memory of the happy days and the contagious expectation of plans for the days that will no longer come. A dramatic and emotional gift from Parallel.
Groovy, with a striking bass in its sensually funky tempo, Trust Fall is a short song in duration, but melodically penetrating from the sum of R&B influences contained in Hoying's singing and the vocal overlays that fill its harmony. With aesthetic similarities to those present in Get Stoned, Hinder's single, Trust Fall is a track with a dangerously danceable and provocative chorus.
After a short period of sweetly low piano notes are pronounced, a vocal overlay already inserts harmony into a scenario that tends towards a rainy melancholy. With a thicker tone, supported by falsetto, but also with a touching interpretation, Hying transforms Mars into a product that could easily be included in Coldplay's repertoire by virtue of its largely sweet and exoteric harmony, but guided by a low vocal like Chris Martin's. Mars is a song of a romantic nature. Mars is a romantic song in which Hying exposes as much of his insecurity as possible in the face of the possibility of disappointing the other in a relationship. The fear of loneliness, of the breakdown of harmony and partnership, and of frustration, are tangent with the pure desire for unconditional, deep and intense love. Not for less that the verses "It's just like the movies", "oh, the world disappears", "we look up at the moon, but sometimes my fears, they just won't vanish too" perfectly define Mars' emotionally unstable plot.
The reality is one, the interpretation is unique, the landscape is flat and the aroma is synthetically homogeneous. Parallel presents Scott Hoying delving into the mysteries of love and relationship under the dancing, colorful and contagious but also melodramatic garments of pop.
A material full of swing and groove for mixing, in addition to pop, mentions of soul, R&B and funk, has in the trio Four, Bubs and Trust Fall its main and defining tracks. After all, in them the Texan presents his honeyed and loving side, as well as his unconditional and uncontrollable sadness, and his sensually provocative side.
All very well synthesized by the team of producers formed by Jon Levine and Dan Farber, who captured the colorfully romanticized essence proposed by Hoying for his debut EP. Ed Boyer and Joe Zook, in turn, close the technical scope with a crystalline mix that makes the EP a versatile material by mixing lightness, colors, sensuality and drama from a range of rhythms that is completed with a simple inclination towards techno present especially in the track King Kong, an ode to intensity and sense of invincibility.
Released on 07/28/2023 via BMG, Parallel is an EP with a romantically melancholic and sticky vein, but which manages to be dramatic, sad, colorful and provocatively danceable in a balanced way. It is simply a work in which the baptized Scott Richard Hoying dissects love and its pains.
