Provided by No Ear Buds
A shot of power pop, “reduce your motion blur” shines with a flashy guitar hook over a pummeling rhythm intertwining the chorus. Comprador teamed up with Charlie D’Ardenne’s former Best Bear bandmate Parker Drew, who recorded a heavy syncopated bass part that drives the simple verse rhythm forward.
Comprador is the alias and recording project of Philadelphia musician Charlie D’Ardenne. Comprador’s upcoming album, please stay off my ass, represents D’Ardenne’s efforts in lyrics and soundscapes to deal with panic about our political future. The title alludes to how worsening social collapse makes cooperation harder or completely untenable because almost everyone is desperate and overworked. This is the aggrieved exclamation of an artist intending to defy our contemporary cultural situation and make songs that can sound abstract or confusing but can also intuitively embody unambiguous meaning. The music presents an accessible sense of familiarity without feeling manufactured or commodified to game of a hashtag algorithm.
Comprador albums tend to be solo efforts by necessity more than by design, and has adopted forced-individualistic resourcefulness as a survival strategy, not an ethos.
Out April 3, “reduce your motion blur” is about living with roommates who hear everything you do and sing, and more generally about maintaining friendships while being aware of your friends’ shortcomings, as well as your own. Returning Comprador collaborator Steve Wethington mixed this track, splitting the difference between the muscular grunge sounds of Heatmiser and the studio ornamentation of Elliott Smith’s later DreamWorks albums.
“I did the piano for ‘reduce your motion blur’ while I was dog-sitting for my sister and brother-in-law in New Jersey and it was powerfully out of tune which is why there are so many effects on that overdub (kind of ended up sounding like a VHS recording of synth strings but it was originally an upright piano),” D’Ardenne said.
Comprador embodies a more fragile whispery-acoustic side than they’ve shown on prior releases. A shadowy electronic groove creeps in, moving like a heartbeat under the second verse which mimics the song narrator’s building anxiety as they sit at the bar brooding about their job and their complicity in the horrors of 2020s society, before a descending piano part ushers in a dramatic coda. The song is about indecision and pessimism collapsing into defeatism and learned helplessness.
“I recorded most of these in my room in philly– I did the drums in the basement,” D’Ardenne said. “I don’t have a piano so I went to my parents’ house for ‘perfect anyone’ and annoyed the shit out of my mom playing that descending chromatic line a hundred times.”
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