“Three lovely dream pop songs, complete with sweet and lovelorn vocals…[which are] doing a pretty good job of making me feel warm and fuzzy during a particularly cold and grey December day.”

Victoria from Pretty Sad recently got in touch to say that her other project, Eerie Summer, had made an album titled the way I don’t understand anything anymore. The band are a duo, Victoria from St Petersburg joined by Maxim from Finland, and make really great, lo-fi indie pop that sounds sweet but hides a complexity of emotions. It’s the aural equivalent of a sad kid’s Tumblr page, all cuteness and charm at first glance, but with a lot of anxiety and sadness hidden just below the surface.

Opener ‘No Big Deal’ dives straight in to the vibe of the album, a slice of jangly lo-fi pop with sugary vocals delivering a chorus of “It doesn’t matter baby, it doesn’t matter / if I’m almost dead / if I’m almost dying”. ‘Never Good Enough’, my favourite song from the album, is an anthem for the shy and belittled, spiky and catchy and shimmery in all the right amounts:

“I wish I could talk to you
I wish I was louder
I wish I had social skills
I wish I was stronger”

The rest of the album doesn’t let things drop. ‘Not the kind of girl to hang around’ is romantic fuzz pop with defiantly headstrong lyrics (“You don’t have to take me home you can drop me off the road / you can tell your friends to piss off and leave me all alone” & “I won’t change for anybody, I won’t change for anyone”), and ‘i don’t need anybody else but you’ is similar in tone but the lyrical flip side, displaying a total devotion to an other. ‘Weird around you’ is another favourite of mine: Slightly slower and bigger with echoey lo-fi undertones, it sounds like a garage band playing a slow romantic number at their high school dance. As if to reinforce the message, closer ‘Its okay’ is probably the best illustration of the album as a whole – a perky pop song with lyrics more kind and understated than gushing about true love:

“its okay to be sad
its okay to feel bad
i’ve got my life (?)
you’ve got your life (?)
and you’ll never see me try
to win your heart”

It’s a great little album all in all and a must for those who like their romantically fuzzy indie pop with a colouring of angst. You can get the way i don’t understand anything anymore on a pay-what-you-want basis via the Eerie Summer Bandcamp page. I’d suggest you do so right now!

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