Sweat, Tears, and Champagne

Kelley Polar “Entropy Reigns (In The Celestial City)” – Form follows content: The surface is almost unbearably, inhumanly slick, and so the lyrics portray the inner life of a man who has been poisoned by aesthetics, and left to wander around a world of glamor with a broken, nihilistic soul. The song is structured like a “Don’t You Want Me”-style “he said/she said,” but it’s worth noting how oddly inconsequential the female parts seem in context — it’s impossible to escape the gravitational pull of his self-absorption, and at it often feels as though she’s just there to prove to himself that they are both real, and that there’s something in the world aside from his glassy-eyed disaffection and self-pity. Weirdly, this all comes off as a sympathetic character study, perhaps thanks to the warmth buried beneath Polar’s synthetic textures and the precise enunciation of the vocalists. (Click here to buy it from iTunes.)