Review
Genre and Mood
Say Yes Dog’s Around My Neck is synth-pop and electro-pop with a shadow in it: introspective and bittersweet in what it says, warm in how it sounds. The interest of the song lies in that gap.
Song Summary
Around My Neck is the second of the four songs on A Friend, the trio’s self-released debut EP of 2013, produced and mixed by Shai Solan; the Topic upload credits all three members as writers. Few reviews singled it out. Electronic Rumors, a synth-pop webzine that offered it as a download in November 2013, heard it as “similar in vein” to the title track, “albeit slightly more introspective”, and gave the one description we have: “Electric piano led, Around My Neck warms things up with some buzzing synths and excitable rhythms, which seems to temper the suspiciously gloomy subject matter.”
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through the song part by part, so this breakdown keeps to the layers that review names.
The Electric Piano
The song is led by an electric piano, the sound at its centre and the first thing to listen for.
The Synths and the Rhythm
Around it, buzzing synths and excitable rhythms do the warming up. In that reviewer’s hearing they push against the lyric’s gloom rather than follow it.
The Voice
Aaron Ahrends sings; the review heard the song as more introspective than the bright title track, without saying more.
Concepts in Focus
A synthesizer can be cold or warm, depending on how its sound is shaped. Here it is the warmth: the buzzing synths sit around an electric piano and lift a song whose subject, to its first reviewer, sounded suspiciously gloomy.
The groove is how the rhythm feels in the body, and it can carry a mood of its own. In Around My Neck the excitable rhythms of Paul Rundel’s bass and Pascal Karier’s drums are what temper the gloom, so the song moves forward even when the words look down. Compare the lighter, more feel-good Say Yes Dog – A Friend from the same EP.
Artistic Context
Say Yes Dog are two Berliners and a Luxembourger who met studying sound engineering and jazz at the conservatory in The Hague. The EP came out of a bluff: unable to get tickets for the Fusion festival, they sent in a video of themselves playing, won a slot and then had to write enough songs to fill it. In those early sets, Ahrends told UNIMAG, they improvised and looped a lot, with less text and longer instrumental parts than on record.
Impact and Reception
Electronic Rumors called the band’s post-Hot Chip quirk-pop instantly likeable and expected a lot of hype. The EP sold a few thousand copies and took them to more than a hundred shows. The band told Club Stereo it was funny to see how far they had come with just four songs, like a big bluff. Listen to the electric piano first, then to what the rhythm does to the mood.
