music moots with Rebounder ("Young-Girl (Illusion)" by Sofie Royer)

music moots with Rebounder ("Young-Girl (Illusion)" by Sofie Royer)

We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.

Today our recommender is the band Rebounder, a band "made up of brothers [Dylan Chenfeld and Noah Chenfeld] and childhood friends [Cobey Arner and Zack Kantor]" in New York City. Rebounder make pop-minded indie rock music. Their tunes are smooth, melodic and catchy. They have the cosmopolitan cheekiness of The Virgins (remember The Virgins?? wow), the soft retro stylings of Portugal. The Man, and the agreeable earworminess of when One Direction sounded most like '80s power pop. I can just tell from listening to a song like "All Strings Attached" that Rebounder want people to have a pleasant time out there.

Rebounder's song suggestion for moi was "Young-Girl (Illusion)" by Sofie Royer—here, Noah Chenfield explains the rec:

The intro to "Young-Girl (Illusion)" from Sofie Royer's new LP lets the listener know something monumental is about to occur. Royer's bass playing, fuzzed-out and formidable, adds to the drama. She'll be the first to tell you she's not a bassist, I heard that first-hand when I had the privilege to play bass for her recently at two shows, but I disagree, her bass playing is melodic and adventurous, like if Peter Hook had studied classical as a kid. Though the intro is sludgy, grand, and intimidating, it transitions into an upbeat, bright, pop verse:

"Don't mess with a girl that wears rabbit fur/I can guarantee that bitch has nothing left to lose." What a fantastic first line! After deliberating on what to wear in Los Angeles while in town for one of the shows, I went with a black, gap leather jacket that had been collecting dust in my closet for months. Like many rockers before me, I'm a sucker for leather, but have lacked the boldness to pull it off. At its best, music has the power to inspire, to move people to make real life changes, and Sofie accomplished that with this song. The tune gave me the confidence to switch up my fit, I didn't regret it. Finally mixing business with leather. 

Songs are the soundtrack to our lives, and everytime I hear this one, I'm brought back to that week in November when I was Sofie's bassist, with my brothers in Rebounder, all of us joking about coastal elitism (the shows were in NY & LA), rocking my leather jacket (finally), uncontrollably singing the opening line at random moments like it was the only song I knew, and in those moments, it was.

This kind of '80s synth pop is always going to be a big fat YES for me. "Young-Girl (Illusion)" is lush and sophisticated, a little formal thanks to that stringent drum machine pattern, but still quite dreamy and loose, especially in that delicious "this wasn't another illluuuuuuuuusion" vocal line. And that '80s vibe could have stood on its own, but we also get the hella moody intro, which is glam and grungy like scuffed-up velour, plus that pensive instrumental bridge, which feels a little early '70s, like the coda of "Layla." We've got layers here. We've got structure. We've got intrigue.

I'm also interested in rabbit fur as a visual motif. There's the homemade rabbit fur coat in I, Tonya, and of course there's "Rabbit Fur Coat," the Jenny Lewis song about her fraught relationship with her mother. That song's rabbit fur coat represents a cold-blooded commitment to social climbing at all costs; Sofie Royer's rabbit fur coat gives off a similar air of desperation. I'm not much of a fur expert, but a little poking around suggests rabbit is a lower-tier material, often dyed and manipulated to look like more expensive pelts. There are even made-up names for rabbit fur imitations: minkony for mink, ermiline for ermine. It makes sense that rabbit fur is the fur for girls with nothing to lose...fur for chameleons and hustlers, (literally) scrappy ladies, ladies who on the bottom rung of the glamour ladder who won't get kicked off without a fight.


Young-Girl Forever, by Sofie Royer
12 track album

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