Review
Genre and Mood
Say Yes Dog’s “Before I Go” is electro-pop and synth-pop in an intimate, melancholic key. It is one of the shortest songs on the trio’s debut album, and the one reviewers kept naming when they looked for the record’s more fragile and less predictable side.
Song Summary
“Before I Go” is the eleventh of twelve tracks on Plastic Love, released on 4 September 2015 by Diskodogs Records, and it runs a little under three minutes before the closing song, “Focus”. Black Plastic called it beautifully vulnerable, one of the tracks where the album’s sophisticated ambitions show without ever quite being realised in full. Renowned for Sound grouped it with “A Friend” and “Girlfriend” as songs with a distinct edge, thanks to funky keystrokes and echoing choruses.
Musical Breakdown
No source we found describes “Before I Go” from beginning to end, so the parts below follow what reviewers heard in it and leave the rest to your ears.
The Keyboards
Renowned for Sound singled out funky keyboard touches as what lifts this song above much of the album, whose tracks the reviewer otherwise found close to one another.
The Choruses
The same review heard echo choruses: the voice repeated, trailing behind itself.
The Voice
Aaron Ahrends sings, and Black Plastic heard the result as vulnerable. Listen for how close or how distant the voice feels against the keyboards.
Outro
How the song ends is not described anywhere. It leads straight into “Focus”, and the German site Terrorverlag heard the two taking comparatively odd paths on the album’s home stretch.
Concepts in Focus
Say Yes Dog cared about where their sounds came from. Bassist Paul Rundel told the German blog Shitesite that the band wanted as many real instruments as possible: real synthesizers rather than computers, live drums rather than samples, because the sound feels more alive. That is the case for the analog synthesizer, whose circuits drift slightly and give a warmth that software is often made to imitate.
An echoing chorus is usually built with delay, an effect that repeats a sound after a set time, often several times and fading. No source says how this band made theirs, so treat it as a listening exercise: hear whether the repeats land in time with the beat and stretch a short phrase across the bar.
Artistic Context
Say Yes Dog are Aaron Ahrends (vocals), Paul Rundel (bass) and Pascal Karier (drums), two Germans and a Luxembourger who met as students in The Hague and became a band in 2012. Their first song won them a slot at the Fusion festival, and their 2013 EP A Friend led to more than a hundred shows across Europe before they took their time over an album. Ahrends is credited as the producer of this track.
Impact and Reception
Shitesite’s Michael Kraft wrote that “experimental” might be too big a word for “Before I Go”, but that it shows a trio after exciting music rather than a service for a fun evening in the club. Hear it next to Say Yes Dog – Girlfriend, two tracks earlier, and decide whether the song’s edge or its vulnerability stays with you.
