My mind starts to go

Speaking of songs that make sense after a week of driving around and lying on the beach...



Before I left, I was one of those people complaining about the auto-tuning that makes the words in the chorus of Alex Gardner's new single "Feeling Fine" incomprehensible. The highly processed sound was a sudden shift from the "Xenomania does singer-songwriter with some synths" of before and hid what many saw as Alex's main asset, his soulful voice. Don't summer singles largely live and die on the ability of a group of people to sing along with them? It's impossible to do that here--well, impossible to do in unison outside of a phrase here and there, since we're probably all just making up our own words to go along with three-fourths of the chorus.

A few days of lakeside towel residence bookended by drives past empty fields and creatively named fishing shops has a way of doing funny things to your music perception, though. A song that previously seemed like the throwing away of a vitally important second chance for a struggling singer to establish himself suddenly becomes the song that makes you wish your increasingly sand-filled headphones hadn't become so tinny that using them is like listening to a thirty-year-old cassette recording of a song's radio debut. Blame the sun, blame the company, blame your cliché-filled brain--but in the end, you can't even blame the great quicktalking middle eight for your newly developed love of the song: that chorus, that darn gibberish-filled robotic chorus, has managed to burrow its way into your brain and, like the sand that a week later seems to have also found its way into every corner of your suitcase, refuses to disappear.

British singer Alex Gardner's second single "Feeling Fine" is released in the UK on September 27 and should eventually be available for purchase here (physical).