How so few elements can create such a luscious soundscape, yet here we are, a cradle of minimalism becomes this lavish tapestry of sound. The drums tumble thud and shimmy shuffle with kicks and clacking handclaps seesawing beneath sprinkling shakers, the whole roly-poly of it organic and breathy on the background of silence, a stark and basic binary where each percussive gambol is a 1 to absence-of-sound's 0. These are the wonderful foundations of 'Yellow' by Cape Town's very own Gourmet—atop these buttresses sit turrets and towers painted with wonky wah-wah synth chords that ring out with hollow iridality in patterns of innocence and playfulness.
In the midst of these half-triumphal quasi-brass hits, the vocals of Gourmet seem to spill out in a profound procession of detail and cryptic mentions that make this quite an abstracted stream of consciousness, the dry matter-of-fact tone in the voice adding to the humour and oddball hat-tips as they accrue collage-esque (much like the track artwork) throughout the track, snippets such as "you're blonde, that's unlikely" and specificities like "small hands, gluten-free spaghetti lad" as well as the hook that speaks of "cyan, magenta, yellow's such a boring word"—high on wordplay.
By the end it's a sudden sultry list of alliterative allusions to sex, "fingertips unzip clitoris lips and flickering anxiousness…" as synth bass pulses like a heavy heartbeat, disappears, gives way to more soft percussion as the vocals continue breathless, descending peals of synth like the jubilation of wedding bells, the scattered mutterings of nervous youth leading up to this crescendo of cloistered coupling that all awkwardness dreams of.
- 🔔 'Yellow' by self-proclaimed "Spaghetti Boy" and musical entity Gourmet is out now courtesy of Cape Town record label, 1991.
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