It happens that one day I run into the videoclip you find here (directly from their VPTV Channel ): the impression I had at first was to be witnessing the heirs – from the digital era – of the legendary Goon Show by Spike Milligan, in which variety, comedy, music hall attitudes and Victorian theater were mixed with British nonsense.
But this was more like a surreal queer cabaret where the participants are having quite a good time, amid some sassy commentaries and a pinch of live music just to make the performance even more sparkling, occasionally helped by some greenish mysterious soft-drinks to open wide the doors of the perception, just like Huxley taught us. (spot: “Drink Amazona”).
Later on the internet I immediately find a track to satisfy my curiosity, it’s called “Centaur“, an experimental and dazzling electro-pop ride where nothing is what it seems, a neo-psychedelia that feels like a choral invitation to abandon any forms of sober anonymity, in the name of an expressive originality, bright as a new frontier.
The Vanity Project duo is not very recent history, in 2016 they won the i’s National Student Battle of Bands crowning the University of Manchester and beating the other 68 competing groups from 18 British universities.
Then, on January 24th the single "Conquistador" was released, thanks to the label Eve of Creation, and everything began to take shape around these two eclectic artists, better known as Flora and Bob, two childhood friends that are able to make a sparkling art-pop, mesmerizing at the first listen, and that has already seduced, among others, Jonathan Higgs (frontman of Everything Everything), their fan from the beginning. If we have to find influences in the duo's music, we might think of Sparks and Tears for Fears at first, the Thomas Dolby of "The Flat Earth", and the baroque poetic lyricism of some works by Kate Bush too, but passing through a necessary renewal of an exquisitely baroque and essentially glam sound, with a sound palette more akin to contemporary and alternative pop, exotic and theatrical, eccentric and capable of breaking through, also thanks to their attention to every detail. Let's follow them: they’re the kind of people that won’t miss to surprise us.
Nando Dorelassi
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