Live Review: Night Tales' 'Friends' is much more than your standard deep house track
Sydney duo Night Tales' new single 'Friends' exudes sunniness - but it's a sunniness which belies a surprising emotional depth for the genre of deep house.
NIGHT TALES, the Sydney-based musical pairing of KAMALIZA (formerly of OLYMPIC AYRES) and THIRD FLOOR, have shared the visuals for their latest single, ‘Friends’, marrying their uplifting brand of house with the equally inspirational video created in collaboration with Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME).
In case you’ve never heard of them before, AIME is a really fantastic charity that pairs disadvantaged high school students with university-level mentors to help eradicate Indigenous educational inequality. The MARCEL BINGHAM-directed Night Tales visuals feature one such student - Lewis - as he dances around his childhood neighbourhood with his AIME mentor, Tre.
According to the duo, the track is “dedicated to the unsung heroes we have in our lives. Those friends who go above and beyond to pick you up when you’re not feeling your strongest. Friends who are by your side without question or hesitation and help you navigate your way out of dark times, feeling alone and in isolation”.
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In contrast, ‘Friends’ will make you feel anything but alone. It’ll throw you straight into a mid-Summer cocktail party, poolside with drink in hand, or into the euphoric middle of a sweaty mosh pit at [insert chosen Summer music festival here]. But this sunniness isn't the usual festival-baiting of other acts. Instead, as per the duo's statement, it belies a surprising amount of emotional depth and honesty to the track. So while 'Friends' basically exudes SPF +50 with its bouncing, colourful synths and halcyon production, the emotive bass lingering in the background and lyrics about generous friendship reveal something else - something which is refreshing to hear in a genre where the convention is to have (mostly) meaningless vocal features as an extra layer of sound in the mix.
In Night Tales’ hands, emotion and meaning ride deeper than this - and that’s what sets them apart in the oft-crowded field of chill / deep / whatever-its-called house. It’s a genre which is almost never associated with feelings of isolation or loneliness, but Night Tales flip that expectation on its head here. In fact, I would say that the most easily associated image of the genre is the complete antithesis of those feelings - gargantuan festival crowds. It’s a bit less easy, on the other hand, to imagine that the genre could also mean something on a much smaller, comparatively microscopic individual level. But on ‘Friends’ Night Tales prove that it can/does.
IMAGE: Supplied
Words by KYLE FENSOM
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