Review
Genre and Mood
Kalabrese and Sarah Palin sing Fresh and Foolish together, on an album that its label placed between indie and electronica and that Cool Hunting heard spanning electronica, funk, disco and indie. The feelings on this page, intimate, warm and playful, are our reading of a duet that BlackPlastic simply called beautiful.
Song Summary
Fresh and Foolish is the fourth of thirteen tracks on Independent Dancer, which Sacha Winkler, alias Kalabrese, released on his Zurich label Rumpelmusig on 26 April 2013; it runs just under five minutes. The vinyl tracklist credits it “feat. Sarah Palin”. The label introduced her as its newest discovery, a singer from Zurich, and she has nothing to do with the American politician of the same name, a joke BlackPlastic made too. She also sings with Kalabrese on the album’s opener, Purple Rose, so Fresh and Foolish is the second of their two duets on the record.
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through this track part by part, so this breakdown names only what the sources say and leaves the rest to your ears.
Intro
Listen for what sets the scene before the voices arrive, and how quickly the groove settles.
Main Section
The heart of the track is the duet: Kalabrese, whose voice Cool Hunting compared to Erlend Øye’s, and Sarah Palin, whose vocals BlackPlastic called sultry and confident on Purple Rose. The sources describe neither the lyric nor how the two voices divide the song.
Outro
Listen for how the track lets go, and whether the voices or the groove have the last word.
Concepts in Focus
A <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist usually means a guest who adds a name and a voice to someone else’s track. Here the host sings too, so the guest turns a solo song into a conversation. Kalabrese did this several times on the album: with Sarah Palin twice, with A.C. Kupper on Let The Good Times Roll and with Khan on Kalabrese, Khan – Desperate Man feat. Khan.
The groove is what holds a song like this together. BlackPlastic heard the whole album as warm electronic funk that applies the focus of minimal to a chaotic funk record: few elements, each placed with care, so the movement comes from how they lock together rather than from how many there are.
Artistic Context
Independent Dancer came six years after Kalabrese’s debut Rumpelzirkus of 2007. Rumpelmusig compared its sound to James Murphy and Nicolas Jaar, heard in Nicolas Jaar – Time For Us, and listed its guests, among them the cellist Dominik Löhrer and the brass players Michael Flury and Benjamin Danech.
Impact and Reception
Fresh and Foolish was never a single, and its recorded reception is a single sentence: BlackPlastic, which found the album brilliant, challenging and a little irritating, singled it out as a highlight and regretted that it came so early. That is reason enough to give it five minutes of your own.
