- Soap Opera Mesadorm 3:49
‘Soap Opera’ is the first single to be taken from Mesadorm’s new album ‘Pollinator’ to be released on 8th April 2022. 3 years in the making, this music has been jammed, collaged, produced and re-produced beginning in a lonely woodland cabin in Stroud and ending in a tiny Hackney home studio. It has witnessed 3 band babies whilst seeing off a near fatal incident all through the lens of a worldwide pandemic. With front woman Blythe Pepino now firmly in the production seat, this album is a melting pot of inventive catchy tune-ery, embodying something not dissimilar to the simplicity of the lowly love song before sweeping sweetly into a barrage of anti-establishment cacophony. All of which is painstakingly clear from the very opening of ‘Soap Opera’;
Soap Opera is the court jester. An overt and sarcastic expression of my rage and depression at being an English person after realizing that I have no pride in that part of my identity at all. I wanted to write a song about what I really think of this country, at this moment, in a way I could just about get away with…because we (and more of us than we think) are blinded by an old reputation of power and righteousness. That’s the scary bit. I don’t think enough people really, deeply believe that we could be headed to overt, rather than disguised, fascism because we have this idea of ourselves as saviors – our national identity bleeds into our individual identities which we want to be generally ‘good’. So, in this tune I enjoy poking that nerve. It’s time that we are able to see ourselves for who we really are so that change can happen
Blythe Pepino
Mesadorm’s new album hasn’t come into fruition without setbacks. Shortly into lockdown Pepino suffered an Aortic Dissection – a tear in the aorta wall -brought on by what was to be later discovered as a rare connective tissue disorder called Vascular Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.
“Luckily I had a lot of time to recover during the pandemic and I had my studio to go to everyday which kept me super happy. I feel incredibly lucky to be alive and to be able to still sing and make music because, apart from just surviving, many who have surgery for this sort of thing end up with severe vocal damage” – Pepino
The introverted studio time brought on some compositional and production success for Pepino working on Netflix’s ‘The Irregulars’ and a cover for Sam Brookes, (self-produced release ‘Numb’), as well as production work for associated Babylegs Records artist Brooke Sharkey. This propelled her taking full charge of production duties for ‘Pollinator’ in early 2021, a choice that has created an incredibly unique piece of work. The playfulness and intention in the sound and songs, created by Mesadorm when they composed the essence of ‘Pollinator’ in a series of jam sessions around one mic in Bristol (summer 2018), has been carefully honoured throughout it’s 3 year journey, allowing for a bolder overall sound whilst still being elegantly rendered. ‘Soap Opera’ stands out with a ‘particularly irreverent’ (Pepino) approach to the treatments of synths and vocals. An unaffected Lo-Fi tone, without losing any of the technical intricacies that Mesadorm have personified in the past.
Bone-melting. Intravenous Cup-a-Soup. Intimacy, depth-channelling beats and shining synth-led harmonies. A unique and bright collage of dead-good. Not for the faint of constitution. For divers not paddlers.
Debut record ‘Heterogaster’ released in 2018 took relationship truths, epiphanies about the nature of family, sexuality, and pain and put them in a blender with heaps of Bjork, Kate Bush, Caribou, chia seeds, fresh ginger and tequila. 2019’s Epicadus gave an acoustic, whisper-in-the-ear retelling that was no less of a punch to the place where sad and beautiful memories think they are safe and out of reach.
Epic standalone releases ‘Let’s Leap’ and ‘Take Me To A Place’ were collaborative attempts with critically acclaimed Bristol based producer and amazing craftsperson Tim Allen (Bat for Lashes // Adrian Utley) to create the tracks for ‘Pollinator’, although when the decision was made for Pepino to re-produce the tracks to be closer to her demo versions, only ‘Take Me To A Place’ (appearing this time as ‘Tenorion Try’) made the cut onto new LP ‘Pollinator’, scheduled for release on 8th April 2022.
‘Pollinator’ offers some of the same cockle-nourishing stick-to-the-side of the glass thickness as previous releases but with a handful of rusty nails thrown in. Carrying an added punky ‘fuck it’ rallying against nationalism and our society’s leaderless descent into the warm, soggy bin of history; Pollinator screams and serenades for alternatives whilst appreciating the beauty and closeness of the moments and connections that really matter as they pass.
SOURCE: Official Bio
LINKS:
https://www.babylegsrecords.com/mesadorm
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https://www.instagram.com/mesadorm
https://www.twitter.com/mesadorm
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3UkK5pD67AThhVlwymGFap?si=K7_UUMzkS52oLUIjU1b1Dg
