REVIEW: The High Plains Drifters — He Reminds Me of You (SINGLE/VIDEO)
Guitar, drums, and a thick bassline would typically be the ingredients one would expect to find in the most black and white of pop jams, but in the case of a new single titled “He Reminds Me of You” by The High Plains Drifters this winter season, they’re all a talented band will need to transform the straightforward into the sophisticated inside of minutes.
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The percussion has a crunch that is typically reserved for the string section in a rock n’ roll band while the bass occasionally feels just a bit too big for the arrangement it’s been worked into. The melodies clamor for our attention amidst a haze of vocal harmonies that seemingly have no begging nor no end, and just when we think the climax here is going to be forged in decadent angst, it reveals itself to be a product of pop purity, unlike anything this composition would imply it to be. Simply put, there’s no comparing the construction — nor the unsuspecting bells and whistles — created in “He Reminds Me of You” to anything on the FM dial this February, but though it lacks the mundanity of mainstream attributions, that could be what makes it such a treasure to listen to right now.
2023 feels like the future if you’ve been a music critic for as long as I have, as the age of true boundary-pushing is at last upon us like few observers outside of the business ever pictured it could be. The High Plains Drifters follow through with experimenting beyond what their forerunners did here brilliantly, beginning with the unorthodox swing of the groove and their direct response to it — giving as lavish a harmony up as they can, just for the sake of relishing in the melodic luxuries their vocals can create if provided with the right instrumental circumstances.
The vocals manage to be bigger than anything else in this mix, and even if nothing ever manages to be quite as eroticized as the rhythm of the percussion beneath them, The High Plains Drifters straddle the beat enough to make their cadence as pivotal to the tempo as the drums are. They are the narrative here, while the instruments beside them speak a language only their melodic charisma can properly understand and translate.
There’s so much to be excited about in contemporary pop this year, but if the underground is where your heart lives for the majority of the time, I don’t think there is another release quite as satisfying as The High Plains Drifters’ latest this winter. Their harmonies alone make this song a difficult single to put down, and while I wasn’t listening to their work just a week ago, the beats in “He Reminds Me of You” have made me anxious to find out what they’re going to add to their discography next. There has never been as awesome a time to be following independent pop music, and any critics who dared to question that in the past five months need to go out of their way to hear this as soon as possible.
Colin Jordan
