Geo Chandler’s new single, “Spent,” arrived like an unexpected late-night espresso – jarring, yes, but with a curiously welcome clarity. It sets out to bottle that bone-deep weariness, the kind where your own thoughts echo a little too loudly in the cavern of your skull, a place where even the dust motes seem to sigh.
Chandler, an Edinburgh architect of sound, builds this with a fascinating, almost anachronistic toolkit. A delicate violin, imbued with a touch of classical sorrow – you can practically smell the old wood and rosin – finds itself weaving through a resolutely modern, driving beat. Then an arpeggiated piano patters in, precise and restless, like the intricate gears of a Black Forest cuckoo clock suddenly deciding to keep time with a rave next door. It’s UK garage and post-dubstep attempting a rather spirited, if slightly bewildered, waltz with the conservatory.
And it’s this very collision that intrigues. For a track ostensibly about being “spent,” it’s surprisingly… twitchy, restless. It’s the audio equivalent of needing to collapse, yet finding your leg jittering with an energy it doesn’t quite understand. That insistent synthesiser line, when it finally blooms, brought to my mind the utterly specific green of wet moss on an ancient stone after a month of drought – a sudden, vibrant sign of life where you’d almost forgotten to look. A little jolt, a pinprick of revival.
This isn’t purely for the dancefloor, mind you; though it has the pulse. It’s more like a soundtrack for pacing your flat at 3 AM, wired and weary, the city lights painting stripes on the wall. An introspective journey taken with a surprisingly insistent rhythm section. It’s a peculiar kind of dance, this one – a conversation with exhaustion that somehow keeps moving.
Does “Spent” leave you fully recharged, ready to scale metaphorical mountains? Perhaps not a full Duracell bunny revival. But it does leave you acutely aware of the hum, the fizz, the strange and often contradictory currents that power us, doesn’t it?
