Pacing x Sun Kin – Annoying Email / Dreams Die

Both Pacing and Sun Kin will be familiar names to anyone who has kept up to date with VSF over recent months. The former, the indie pop/anti-folk project of Katie McTigue, “follows in the playful, tongue-in-cheek tradition of the likes of Kimya Dawson,” as we’ve put it previously, “yet always nudges the ideas further to be more than mere twee humour or sardonic fun.” While Kabir Kumar’s Sun Kin has offered everything from bright pop to organic ambient soundscapes, and further expanded its stylistic range with a series of collaborations.

It’s fitting then that the latest of these partnerships sees Sun Kin team up with Pacing for a pair of singles, each supporting the other in a mutual lead/support type deal. McTigue takes the lead for ‘Annoying Email’, the third single from Pacing’s forthcoming full-length Real Poetry, which serves as a textbook example of the project’s style. Ironic yet also somehow entirely sincere, the song holds up the everyday in all of its surreal and often torturous truth. There’s a reason, after all, why sending emails is so simple in practice yet feels like pulling teeth. McTigue walks us into the heart of this sensation, constantly feeling on the verge of screaming or breaking into hysterics, yet always just managing to keep that polite, upbeat tone.

Written after an abrupt job loss, ‘Dreams Die’ sees Sun Kin wrestle with our complicated relationships with ambition and work. So much of our self-worth is wrapped up in ideas of successful employment, yet the reality of such experiences are often soul-sucking and cold. How to take the blows without losing hope? Sun Kin negotiates the situation with a mix of pop and post-punk sensibilities, and McTigue grounds the mood with a Sidney Gish-esque verse on the worst of work, where envy and insecurity curdle into a vague idea of self-improvement. “Today I will read a book / Or do a pushup /
If I can.” The track tip-toes between hope and pessimism in this way, and ends up as a kind of the murky space beyond the Pacing single. The annoying emails have stopped, but in their absence is only the slow hiss of your deflating self-worth.

‘Annoying Email’ is available from the Pacing Bandcamp page, and ‘Dreams Die’ from the Sun Kin page.