"but what kind of message is that... that I just needed love that bad..."
The shimmy shaking surf beat and rolling thunder guitar on "Danger Decides" by Shaylee, the Portland based project, alter-ego, band of divergent singer-songwriter, creative queer trans artist Elle Archer, is downright captivating in it's sort of doo wop punk, heartland rock, 60's teen tragedy pop milieu. There is a lot going on and Elle crafts this shiny piece of loveliness in wide cinemascopic ways. There is a blue collar rock texture with more innocent leanings, chunky heaviness and pearly sounds like Springsteen colliding with twee pop. Elle's tender vocal melodies oftentimes mirrored by synths and bells is so incredibly dreamy with bits of melancholy happiness (yes, that's really a thing). I have written about Elle before and while I have not delved into her entire collection of work, this (to me) feels like the most vast and romantic thing she has done.
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
https://www.facebook.com/shayleeband
https://shayleeband.bandcamp.com/
https://twitter.com/Shayleeband
https://www.instagram.com/shayleeband/
https://soundcloud.com/shayleepdx
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6TZ8OLOLqfh4tvA0XIu1I6?si=VDhI_H9jQJOVw-d702h-bQ&nd=1
As Shaylee, Portland, Oregon’s Elle Archer writes music that is expansive, lush, and heartbreaking. She’s been making music since she was a teenager, but her upcoming release, Short-Sighted Security, almost feels like her debut. “I’ve had so much time to grow artistically, it feels like a culmination of all the work that I’ve done up until now,” she says of the record. Spanning thirteen songs, the album is the result of a dedicated and deep love of music. It’s also a thematically unified record, one about failing relationships, growing pains, and falling short of your goals of self-improvement.
Elle, who is a queer trans woman, grew up enamored with making music. She cites early experiences as a teen playing guitar on church worship teams as well as in her high school jazz band as heavily formative. She remembers mixing every element she’d hear on stage in her in-ear monitors, and then going home to toy around with what she had learned, in awe of the endless possibilities that come with sitting alone and reimagining sound. Elle also has a history of listening to and loving music, especially turn-of-the-century space rock opuses like Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space by Spiritualized, The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Radiohead’s OK Computer. You could say that Short-Sighted Security is a tribute to indie music, a study of a lifelong obsession with the jangly hooks of indie pop, the grandiosity of post-rock, and the lean toughness of indie rock, all wrapped up with the wide register of feelings associated with those early days of listening to songs that changed Elle’s life.
Short-Sighted Security is also a record that is as DIY as they come. Recorded almost entirely alone in a living room in Portland during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, Elle did everything on this record, she plays all the guitars (for the heads: she used a Rickenbacker 330 for nearly every track on the record), a prized Roland Juno 60, the drums, and the bass. She also sings, mixes, and engineers. The only other musicians she enlisted are her friend Matt, who is credited with organ, violin, and cello on a couple tracks, and her friend Travis, whom she credits with bongos, and crucially—whispers. This sort of intense precision and dedication is clear from the album’s outset.
Opener “Oblivion,” features quivering vocals, and intricate guitars that slingshot like rubber bands thrusted into deep space. The track vividly immerses the listener in darkness with a deft mix of paranoid psych rock, jazzy chromaticism, and spacious, burbling synths. “They called me out and I deserved every bit of it/So I stepped out, stepped outside for a cigarette,” she sings, immediately honing in on the idea that this is a record about simmering in your feelings, detailing the rumination stage that comes before actively trying to change the ways in which you move through the world. Second track “Ophelia,” splits open in the song’s final third, exposing a network of crash cymbals, spectral pianos, and ecstatic vocals. The song is otherworldly, a bricolage of ‘60s British invasion bands like the Kinks and noisy, overblown indie pop that travels in the most unexpected of directions. The kinetic “Danger Decides,” is both a light at the end of the tunnel and a relapse on bad behavior—An exuberant mission statement of debauchery set to anthemic power pop, all decadently laced with mellotrons and glockenspiels and outfitted with one of the record’s most infectious hooks: “I’ve got a new lease on life,” Elle proclaims in a seeming moment of clarity, only to deliver her sinister conclusion, “Danger decides.”
Some of the record’s most beautiful moments come from its most candid lyrics. Take “#1 Destroyer Fan,” a song that almost feels like a diary entry. “Purple, white, grey, black flag hung above where we were fags/ A chasm forming in your head/The last time I saw your bed,” Elle sings in one particularly intimate part of the song, evoking a memory of an intense experience she wishes she handled better. So much of life, the song seems to say, is spent recognizing where you need to grow but not knowing the right way forward. That throughline can be found in every corner of this record. Short-Sighted Security reads like a lonely cautionary tale set to the soundtrack of a deeply musical mind with a singular vision, making for an ambitious label debut that establishes Shaylee as a force all its own.
To make matters even better, the Official Video, written and directed by Elle and India Jade Petersen is unbelievably fun. The list of disclaimers at the beginning is so funny and you feel the collective love throughout as you watch the silliness unfold. I do urge you, though, to listen to "Danger Decides" on it's own after you view the video because listening to it on it's own will surely conjure up things in your head and heart that are new to you. It is that kind of special song that you will likely (like me) listen to on repeat a buhzillion times.
"Danger Decides" is from Shaylee's full length homegrown album "Short-Sighted Security" dropping on March 18th, 2022.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
https://www.facebook.com/shayleeband
https://shayleeband.bandcamp.com/
https://twitter.com/Shayleeband
https://www.instagram.com/shayleeband/
https://soundcloud.com/shayleepdx
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6TZ8OLOLqfh4tvA0XIu1I6?si=VDhI_H9jQJOVw-d702h-bQ&nd=1
As Shaylee, Portland, Oregon’s Elle Archer writes music that is expansive, lush, and heartbreaking. She’s been making music since she was a teenager, but her upcoming release, Short-Sighted Security, almost feels like her debut. “I’ve had so much time to grow artistically, it feels like a culmination of all the work that I’ve done up until now,” she says of the record. Spanning thirteen songs, the album is the result of a dedicated and deep love of music. It’s also a thematically unified record, one about failing relationships, growing pains, and falling short of your goals of self-improvement.
Elle, who is a queer trans woman, grew up enamored with making music. She cites early experiences as a teen playing guitar on church worship teams as well as in her high school jazz band as heavily formative. She remembers mixing every element she’d hear on stage in her in-ear monitors, and then going home to toy around with what she had learned, in awe of the endless possibilities that come with sitting alone and reimagining sound. Elle also has a history of listening to and loving music, especially turn-of-the-century space rock opuses like Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space by Spiritualized, The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Radiohead’s OK Computer. You could say that Short-Sighted Security is a tribute to indie music, a study of a lifelong obsession with the jangly hooks of indie pop, the grandiosity of post-rock, and the lean toughness of indie rock, all wrapped up with the wide register of feelings associated with those early days of listening to songs that changed Elle’s life.
Short-Sighted Security is also a record that is as DIY as they come. Recorded almost entirely alone in a living room in Portland during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, Elle did everything on this record, she plays all the guitars (for the heads: she used a Rickenbacker 330 for nearly every track on the record), a prized Roland Juno 60, the drums, and the bass. She also sings, mixes, and engineers. The only other musicians she enlisted are her friend Matt, who is credited with organ, violin, and cello on a couple tracks, and her friend Travis, whom she credits with bongos, and crucially—whispers. This sort of intense precision and dedication is clear from the album’s outset.
Opener “Oblivion,” features quivering vocals, and intricate guitars that slingshot like rubber bands thrusted into deep space. The track vividly immerses the listener in darkness with a deft mix of paranoid psych rock, jazzy chromaticism, and spacious, burbling synths. “They called me out and I deserved every bit of it/So I stepped out, stepped outside for a cigarette,” she sings, immediately honing in on the idea that this is a record about simmering in your feelings, detailing the rumination stage that comes before actively trying to change the ways in which you move through the world. Second track “Ophelia,” splits open in the song’s final third, exposing a network of crash cymbals, spectral pianos, and ecstatic vocals. The song is otherworldly, a bricolage of ‘60s British invasion bands like the Kinks and noisy, overblown indie pop that travels in the most unexpected of directions. The kinetic “Danger Decides,” is both a light at the end of the tunnel and a relapse on bad behavior—An exuberant mission statement of debauchery set to anthemic power pop, all decadently laced with mellotrons and glockenspiels and outfitted with one of the record’s most infectious hooks: “I’ve got a new lease on life,” Elle proclaims in a seeming moment of clarity, only to deliver her sinister conclusion, “Danger decides.”
Some of the record’s most beautiful moments come from its most candid lyrics. Take “#1 Destroyer Fan,” a song that almost feels like a diary entry. “Purple, white, grey, black flag hung above where we were fags/ A chasm forming in your head/The last time I saw your bed,” Elle sings in one particularly intimate part of the song, evoking a memory of an intense experience she wishes she handled better. So much of life, the song seems to say, is spent recognizing where you need to grow but not knowing the right way forward. That throughline can be found in every corner of this record. Short-Sighted Security reads like a lonely cautionary tale set to the soundtrack of a deeply musical mind with a singular vision, making for an ambitious label debut that establishes Shaylee as a force all its own.
Shaylee, Elle Archer, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock, divergent rock, dream pop, doo wop punk, cross genre'd, cross generational music, "Danger Decides", "Short-Sighted Security" album,
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