Alexander Boe & The Botanicals make a very sharp left turn into the surreal with their new single, “Poor Little Rich Girl (Shirley).” The sonic collage of vocoded harmonies, cryptic abstraction and art rock eccentricity on this song is a fever dream drenched in Tel Aviv’s underground cool.
The track begins like a glitch in the matrix, instantly enfolding you in the warm, alien embrace of vocoded vocals. Boe is dissecting it, refracting it and reassembling it into something that sounds as if it had been transmitted from another dimension. It’s a breakup song in theory, a breakup song paid for by an appointment bracelet but in practice, it’s something altogether more avant-garde, a commentary on emotional distance and identity, and the absurdity of wealth and romance.
“Poor Little Rich Girl (Shirley)” is the musical equivalent of an arthouse picture’s closing credits. Instead, it fashions a universe in which emotional ache goes behind designer sunglasses, in which every line of lyrics is spoken through a curtain of sonic mist and in which the listener is invited to find or lose themselves in the haze.
Boe’s delivery is undeniably dramatic, and the production by The Botanicals is as much a character in the storytelling as the lyrics. Warped synths slither through the track like shadows at twilight, and something about the rhythmic pacing gives the track just enough structure to join its strange beauty without ever feeling too safe.
In a world all too often fixated on immediacy and algorithmic precision, Alexander Boe represents a willfully slap in the face. This is art rock with its calipers set wide, and it’s not trying to win over the whole world. That’s exactly why it works.
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