Sacha Mullin (Chicago singer songwriter) has another cracking album out with “Social Touch’ his 4th solo album. He’s working with producer William Parker Wood and the result is a rather more pop oriented album, built around piano, synths, programmed rhythms, guitar and bass. The appeal is in how well the arrangements serve his own particularity. You can see him genuinely interested in the process of taking a rather complex feeling and making it into something that someone else could sing.
His love of pop is the key to understanding that approach. A good chorus in itself provides a very particular form of companionship; it’s the act of someone else having taken an emotional mess and turned it into a phrase you can remember. “Social Touch” takes that idea and runs with it in the context of songs about connection, desire and the sheer difficulty of really understanding another person. The songs are very accessible in their direction and provide a very welcoming musical backdrop to those themes, with Mullin’s emotive singing ensuring that the inherent complications of the subject matter remain very much in play.
The Wood collaboration also gives the record a real sense of discovery. The songs came from conversations, from ideas that would just pop up at the keyboard, with both of us working on the arrangements. It’s very much the feel of two people working off each other’s instincts. The sheer amount of instrumental detail and the directness of the melodic writing throughout makes a very good case for just going with it while the excitement is still there.
“Hypocenter” (with Emily Bindiger on backing vocals) is a very good example of the kind of track that works. It’s a synth-based piece which provides a very tangible outlet for the emotional yearning. Mullin’s expansive vocal performance is perfectly suited to that. The whole of the backing track provides something for his vocal performance to interact with and the joy is in the sheer amount of emotional expression being contained within a big, expansive arrangement.
Elsewhere “Bed All Day” has an awkwardly phrased request for emotional consistency within the context of a very upbeat pop song. You can absolutely want to be close to someone and at the same time be very anxious about your position. Mullin gets the way that attraction can so easily become negotiation. The very upbeat delivery makes that quite a bit more acute in fact; you can be having the fun of the invitation and still be acutely aware of the uncertainty. His writing gives that romantic fervour a very credible amount of nervous energy.
What really interests me about “Social Touch” is its readiness to make connection both pleasurable and demanding in the same breath. Mullin’s voice is capable of great theatricality and these arrangements give that theatricality a social raison d’etre. He wants the feeling to be received by someone. The popness of it all makes that ambition very real, turning a private set of preoccupations into melodies which are designed to go out into the world and become part of someone else’s day to day existence.
*This review was made possible by MusoSoup
