I think 2022 is the Year of Second Chances – given I didn’t get mine (long story, sort of detailed in the next podcast). First Rebecca Black, now an ex-reality TV contestant Cody Frost doing really interesting music.
Cody Frost is famous for being on The Voice five years ago and I remembered her and her amazing voice – covering ABBA in that style definitely got my attention. I have to confess my guilty pleasure is watching old blind auditions from The Voice on YouTube.
It’s totally emotional tourism but even though reality TV is not my thing, and I hate Simon Cowell/X Factor, BGT and all that ‘I’m Team X’ voting blather. Also not a fan of melisima, getting the runs and scales to show off, but the blind audition aspect does give it a new spin. There is a diversity of acts that you get on the Voice who get a chance where on other shows they get rejected immediately on their looks.
Sadly many of them go on to do nothing (the ones I like I check up on, surprised Mo didn’t go further), so I was pleasantly surprised that Cody Frost swerved that whole reality TV machine and is doing her own original thing and it’s really good.
Releasing music independently is always a plus from me, I try to avoid the corporates, line me up with ‘failed punks’ and the indie folx, that’s always where my heart lies. I don’t think the corporate machine would get a queer artist like Cody Frost, or anyone at all different, which is really weird since the music industry used to revere the new and shocking. Now it’s very much a sausage machine, the good stuff is on the fringes.
Firstly these are all from 2021’s IT’S NOT REAL EP we have the pop, which as with Rebecca Black’s recent work is personal. The theme resonates deeply with me, and I remember that weird loneliness with Uni splitting up the gang and your childhood friends go AWOL, their drug friends and not fitting in generally. (Is that the bar she used to work that The Voice visited?)
The lyrics are very deep – ‘I thought I could see stars out of my window, But it turns out that it was light, Refracting out of somebody else’s home onto, Tiny raindrops, tiny droplets of water trying to make, The faintest impression on people The faintest impression in an ocean.” Not your usual pop song! Apparently the songs start as poetry, which I can definitely hear.
Similarly about deeper ussues – anxiety I think, STOMACHACHES has more of a pop punk/breaks edge, along the line of PENGSHUi and Strange Bones & Calva Louis and really they should work with her. I was surprised she didn’t do more metal/punk music, given that’s what she admitted she was into back in her first Voice audition. Love the uptempo bit at the end, sort of Chvrches meets the Prodigy.
But in the vein of that first blind audition, we have an original ‘(I should) take better care’ which the lines ‘And I’m not fighting, Personal demons, These are just demons, We all have to face’ shows a maturity and universality that is rare in slow songs like this. Hits me in the feels, also getting Toyah/Hazel O”Connor Breaking Glass vibes which is not a bad thing at all.
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