The release of Fickle Friends’ single Not in the Mood on March 30th wasn’t an earth shattering one for me, I’m not gonna lie, but I’ve found myself in a slight rut in terms of the music i’ve been listening to recently, and decided to give it a go. Now, I haven’t listened to Fickle Friends since they played a gig at my college about 4 years ago and I’m gonna be honest, I wasn’t blown away then. Now looking at their Spotify it seems that they’re finding a pretty decent amount of success, with over 400,000 monthly listeners, and it doesn’t surprise me. Their music isn’t offensively, well, anything, and this latest single is no different.
I suppose there needs to be a ‘middle of the road’ so that genuinely creative artists can veer from that, so credit to Fickle Friends in that sense, I do see the purpose of the music they’re making. However, Not in the Mood just sounds like an amalgamation of a plethora of pop songs from the last decade, so much so that you can’t definitively say “hang on a minute, they’ve ripped this song off” but for the entire 3:13 you’re thinking “I know I’ve heard this before, where the fuck have I heard this before?!”
With an opening line like “I’m in my bedroom, waiting for something, something I know isn’t good for me” there’s no surprise that what follows isn’t Ducter or Sunglasses but I wasn’t asking for that, I just expected a little more than what I heard. I don’t know why in retrospect and to be fair the production is ultraclean but it leaves an almost sickeningly sweet taste in the mouth of the listener who, by the end of the track, truly has gained absolutely nothing from the experience.
Don’t get it twisted, there’s a place for Fickle Friends, as evidenced by their following, as long as there a people that “aren’t really into music” there will be listeners a plenty for this inoffensive, tailor-made-for-local-breakfast-radio mediocrity.
