On songs like PS Exclusive, Juno and New Town, Tompkins’ voice makes the music’s recursive complexity feel exuberant and nimble and, in turn, her voice is lent weight to push against and a rhythm to spar with by its backdrop. The band’s two kinds of energy are not so very far apart: both parts are irrepressible and sometimes ferocious, sometimes disarmingly sweet. This spiky, intricate guitar music inspired by bands including Don Caballero and Mission of Burma, and fronted by an artist-turned-singer who’s preoccupied with turning language inside out, perhaps shouldn’t work, but it really does. Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Life Without Buildings’ first and only studio album, Any Other City. There’s a curious timeliness to the song’s belated popularity. One TikToker captioned their video: “These aren’t words but I like them.” Another wrote: “I have no idea what this means but I love it.” “If I lose you, if I lose you,” she chants, over Chris Evans’ bass thrum, “uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, mm-mmm.” A stuttering, sung-spoken incantation of wired and insensible longing, it sounds improvised, as if it fell out of her mouth fully formed, though it wasn’t. Most often, though, they mime enthusiastically to singer Sue Tompkins’ remarkable vocal performance, which veers charismatically somewhere between the stylings of Gertrude Stein and TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. The label focused their energy on appealing to her gay fan base, but once Believe hit CD players, her new sound had a wide appeal.A mid a relentless stream of events that are not what we bargained for, one tiny good thing has come out of nowhere: the sudden return of the cult Glasgow band Life Without Buildings, thanks to viral ubiquity on TikTok.Īll over the app, teenagers (notably young women) are using a 15-second slice of the band’s math-y post-rock single The Leanover, released before they were born, to soundtrack videos in which they, well, do what teenagers do: bleach their hair, demonstrate “fairycore” makeup, vape exuberantly or simply emote for the front-facing camera. ![]() "She hadn't hit the Top 40 since 1991 and she was kind of casting around looking for her next hit and trying to figure out where to even go artistically," Thompson said. Throughout the '80s and '90s, she had a string of successes, including an Oscar for Moonstruck in 1988 and her hit If I Could Turn Back Time released a year later.īut when her 1995 album of rock ballads, It's a Man's World, fell flat with fans, Warner Music looked to reinvent the artist. Ready for a hitīelieve came at a pivotal time for Cher, whose career had been in a slump. "She's been quoted in newspapers as saying, and I quote, 'You can change that part of it over my dead body,'" Thompson recalled.Īfter a short battle, the song went to print with a unique sound that was largely unheard by the public at the time. Her label, Warner Music, disagreed and wanted a straight vocal track. "She's going to think, 'Oh my God, why are they changing my voice?'"īut she loved it and knew she had something special on her hands. "He was very, very nervous about giving that version of the song to Cher because she's the singer," Thompson said. According to the New York Times, Taylor tried it out and transformed two bars of Believe to give Cher her robotic timbre. Software called Auto-Tune had just come on the market. As soon as you heard that song, you knew it was a juggernaut. Of the six billed writers, four more, including Cher, are said to have helped.Īs the song came together, Cher and the record's producers, Paul Barry and Mark Taylor, felt something was missing. Months of tinkering, rewrites and experimentation went into the song, first written in the early '90s by Brian Higgins who became known for his work with Dannii Minogue. Birth of Auto-Tuneĭespite its massive popularity, the song had rocky beginnings. ![]() " Believe brought to the pop marketplace the idea of Auto-Tune and vocoder and those effects as a tool to make music sound different than it ever sounded before," Thompson said. ![]() Kanye West relied on vocal processing for his album 808s and Heartbreaks, while country star Faith Hill incorporated the technology into her crossover hit The Way You Love Me. While some artists use it to fix imperfections, others exploit its robotic output. Since Believe's release, countless songs and artists have relied on Auto-Tune - for better or worse. That modern sound has shaped the music industry today.
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