REVIEW: Heartour — When the Lights Go Down (SINGLE)
It isn’t very often that synthesizers can produce the kind of warmth we find them offering in the new single “When the Lights Go Down” from Heartour, but when they do, it’s something worth writing home about. Rather than serving as the bedrock of the song’s main harmony exclusively, the synths play multiple roles in this single — chief among them being that of the bridge between linguistic and sonic poeticisms. Heartour isn’t a one-dimensional act, and in order to get to the level of emotionality they want us to appreciate in “When the Lights Go Down,” limits of all sorts have to be pushed (starting with those of the instrumentation most artists would consider the stock componentry of any given performance).
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The lead vocal is more relaxed in this song than the lyrics it’s dishing out are, and the confliction becomes a flashpoint for excitement as we push forward in the track. Although there’s nothing wrong with melding two similarly soft elements together to make something poppy and radio-ready, there’s just as much to be said about the provocative manner in which Heartour is gaining a lot of time in the headlines lately, and “When the Lights Go Down” verifies as much. Mathy but still possessing the even flow all of us want out of an up-tempo pop tune, this is the kind of single that you don’t have to think twice about falling in love with, yet the story it has to tell is a lot more complicated than one would initially suspect.
The contrast between the way the frontend of this mix was stylized versus the back is striking and important to ensure the degree of sonic punch Heartour wanted on the other side of the chorus, and even though some critics will say it’s one dabble in excess too many, I couldn’t disagree more. Where the other songs on Divert the Asteroid are more black and white tonally, this has a lot of brawn that is going towards emphasizing the theme of the lyrics. Everything is contributing something to the mood of the music and, more importantly, the context of the verses as they’re being delivered to us, which has not been true for the vast majority of new singles to debut in the past month.
I’ve loved all the music Heartour has given us in recent years, and after listening to the solo project’s new EP I feel like we’re witnessing a much-wanted extension of artistic ideals only highlighted in previous efforts. “When the Lights Go Down” is all-in on its conceptualism, and even if it willfully steps away from the predictable in the name of getting pop to somewhere new, exciting and different, I think it’s a worthy tradeoff for what we end up with in this single. I’m going to keep supporting Heartour, and though the competition for this act is getting just as difficult to ignore in 2021, there hasn’t been anything to rocket through the underground with the kind of spirit songs like this one have in spades.
Colin Jordan
