V V Brown – Crying Blood
V V Brown has a song called Crying Blood
that I can’t shake. It’s just relentless—that 50s-pop thing with her voice climbing over this hammering melody, somewhere between The Ting Tings and something older that I can’t quite place. The kind of track that burrows in and won’t leave.
It’s the architecture of it, really. There’s this swing to the rhythm that feels both retro and immediate, and her voice sits on top of it with this brightness that shouldn’t work over something that dark but absolutely does. The chorus is built for repetition—it wants to stay in your head, and it succeeds.
I’ve had it on repeat for days now. Not in the way you sometimes force yourself to listen to something you think you should like, but that involuntary thing where you catch yourself humming it or it just starts playing in your head while you’re doing something else. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway.
There’s something both very current and very dated about it, and I’m not sure if that tension is what makes it work or if I’m just trying to explain why I can’t stop listening to it. Probably the latter.