I’ve always been a fan of pop music with bells on. And by that, I mean both pop music that is delivered with enthusiasm, but also songs that actually have real life bell sounds. Iris Gold’s latest is an absolute belter and scores on both fronts. OK the bells are more bicycle tings that Big Ben bangers, but still they work.
Roll It Out is the sort of pop song that I hoped Charli XCX would have delivered recently but hasn’t - sorry Charli your latest offerings haven’t done anything for me.
This jam is full of strutting energy and hooks and has the feel-good factor turned up to past 10 – something perhaps we all need now and then, particularly when a recent study by the University of California has found that pop music is getting sadder (read more about that on i-D by clicking here). This is a song about getting on with life; enjoy it if you can - because it doesn’t last forever.
Iris Gold - Roll It Out
If big hair was a guarantee of big success (we’re looking at you Rae Morris and Ella Eyre) then Iris Gold would be a dead certainty. Alas the rules of pop are far more complicated than that; although good hair is nearly as important as good songs - there's so many cases of an artist getting a bad haircut and never recovering creatively or commercially.
However, irrespective of Moby like baldness or her current big afro, and irrespective or commercial potential or not, we’d be writing about Iris Gold’s Color Trip, because it’s one of those slightly chattering, trippy sounding pop tunes that’s just infused with cool. If you’ve ever heard Q-Tee (she rapped on St Etienne’s song Calico from their 1993 LP So Tough and had one minor hit single a few years later with Gimme That Body) or Ms Dynamite (surely she needs no introduction) then you might be inclined to compare the delivery style to one of those.
Color Trip’s already been picked up by a small handful of blogs and pretty much all of them will have already told you something about the lyrics which mention incense, crystals and flowers in the hair. This is good because we’re often appalled by the lack of attention that blogs pay to lyrics -we wrote about that on this post linked here. Alas in this instance it probably has more to do with the press release feeding this information, but still, at least people are enjoying Iris’s hippie-hop vibe.
Iris Gold - Color Trip
Iris Gold already wowed us with WOW! (a track that has now been deleted from her Soundcloud) and now she’s digging up musical gold dust with Goldmine, which we’re informed is her ‘debut official track’ - make of that what you will. Throwing together some old school hip-hop / R&B production, a chirpy pop sensibility, whistle like electronics and a small child delivering some rhymes (one of those ‘it really shouldn’t work but it does moments’) this one marks Iris out as being a little different from your run of the mill rapper or pop pretender. But then we knew that already from WOW! didn't we?
After yesterday’s post where we joked about the fact that Kiiara probably wasn’t brought up in a commune of free loving French hippies, we can reveal that Iris grew up in Freetown Christiana, which is an autonomous fringe commune in Copenhagen. Apparently it even has a famously liberal/free-thinking anything-goes culture; which just goes to show that blogging about pop music and all that surrounds it can be full of twists, turns and contradictions.
Iris has yet to find much support from the blogosphere, but she’s got some big support elsewhere, with slots on one of the stages at both Blur and Taylor Swift’s shows at Hyde Park, London, which let's face it is probably worth more than it's weight in er...gold.... to Iris than a couple of hundred plays from a tin pot music blog.
Iris Gold - Goldmine
“Remember when hip-hop was fun?” Iris Gold asks as her tag line on her Facebook page. She has a point doesn’t she? Hip-hop has become a bloody serious business. And whilst that’s sometimes a good thing (we’re in agreement with the critical mass that Kendrick Lamar’s album is a rather brilliant listen – dense, absorbing, complex, not an easy ride) sometimes what we want music to do is lift our spirits and make us dance our ass off and nothing more. Salt ‘n’ Pepper made us do that. Betty Boo made us do that. Charli XCX makes us do that. And somewhere in between all of those fits Iris Gold.
She has three tracks on line and each of them is packed with grooves, ideas and a cartoonish sense of fun. Our favourite is her most recent upload WOW! an incessant hook-filled piece of bubblegum funk that stomps along with a sass and radio ready shoutiness – we’re streaming it below.
As another one of Iris’s tag lines suggests, clear a path for her, she’s coming through.
Iris Gold - WOW!
