Common goldfish is a Tottenham-based musician who’s really making a name for himself with his blatantly vast capacity for creativity. He seems to be able to take various musical notions, whack ‘em all together, and come up with something that sounds like it was meant to be that way. His sophomore single, ‘Shout Louder’, came out recently. Giving a somewhat similar vibe as his debut ‘Feel The Fuzz’, this new tune goes even harder. He hasn’t held back, that’s for sure.
There’s so much going on in this song to zoom your listening attention towards, but it never seems overwhelming or ‘too much’, and no instrument ever seems to overbear others. Everything intermingles and bounces off the other sounds, flirting and flurrying around the trippy dreamscape of sonic heaven that common goldfish has created here (probably with a magic wand).
The track starts pretty simply, but extremely effectively, with some groovy – and I mean groovy - bassline. The first lyrical input comes in the form of the song’s title ‘shout louder’ being, well, shouted repeatedly. By this point, I’m getting big Screamadelica vibes, and I ain’t complaining! What follows next adds some serious depth to the song, taking it up a notch or two; some jangly, bouncy piano enters the soundscape and now we’re left with no doubt in our minds that this track was made for the Hacienda or a similar club setting today, as this lively piano part is reminiscent of the Happy Mondays’ sound. As if our minds weren’t already well on the way to being blown, common goldfish thought he’d take us up another level towards euphoria, and blesses us with some hollow, psychedelic guitar which swims through the track with a strange sort of lucid subtlety.
So yeah, the instrumentation in this new single is certainly pretty damn good, but let’s not forget the vocals that common goldfish has clearly put a lot of thought into as well. The verses feature accent-driven, trippy lyrics like ‘look into each other’s eyes’ in a Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds style of singing. The fascinating thing about the vocals in this track is that they don’t overbear the instruments; they aren’t louder than the instruments, so they don’t take the attention away from the impressive instrumentation. Nor does the instrumentation overbear the vocals. They simply live and flow in unison through this sonic acid trip. The chorus represents the song’s climax; we’ve reached euphoria! ‘Shout louder’ is chanted over and over, almost as if we’re all sat around in a woodland paradise and common goldfish is a psychedelic cult leader.
Well, if that was the case, sign me up!
Get lost in this trippy musical journey here: