Review
Genre and Mood
Say Yes Dog’s “Deep Space” is soft synth-pop, electro-pop at its most unhurried: dreamy in its sound and relaxed in its pace, a song that floats rather than pushes.
Song Summary
“Deep Space” opens Voyage, the trio’s second album, and it was the first thing anyone heard of it: the band released it as a single on 8 March 2019, two months before the album. Its theme is in the title. Bedroomdisco wrote that the opener shows straight away where the journey is heading: it begins with an old recording of a rocket launch and then sounds like a relaxed trip into space. MusikBlog called it the soft synth-pop opener of an album whose concept is airy sonic worlds, and Indie Spirits heard electronic echoes, soft percussion and sampled sounds in a dreamy, danceable groove.
Musical Breakdown
No source describes the song bar by bar, so the breakdown keeps to the two moments the reviewers do describe.
Intro: Lift-off
The song starts with the rocket launch, a found recording rather than an instrument, before the band comes in. On an album named Voyage it works as a countdown.
Main Section: The Drift
After the launch the song settles into what Bedroomdisco called a relaxed trip into space. The album as a whole, MusikBlog wrote, is dominated by nostalgic synths, falsetto hooks, funky basslines and clapping drums, delivered smoothly and casually; which of those carry Deep Space, the reviews do not spell out.
Concepts in Focus
sampling is not only about borrowing a beat or a hook. Here the borrowed material is a document: an old recording of a rocket launch, placed at the very start so that the first thing on the album is not music but an event. Before a note is played, the listener knows where the voyage is going.
The synthesizer is what turns that idea into a sound. Bedroomdisco noted that on Voyage the band gave itself over fully to synths and sank deep into the electro-pop of the 1980s. A synth sound can be shaped to swell and fade without the sharp attack of a struck string or drum, which is why soft synths suit a song about drifting in space.
Artistic Context
Say Yes Dog is Aaron Ahrends on vocals and keyboards, Paul Rundel on bass and Pascal Karier on drums, a German-Luxembourgish trio who met studying sound engineering and jazz at the conservatory in The Hague. The album version credits all three as writers and Ahrends as producer. Voyage came out on 10 May 2019 on Diskodogs Records, four years after their debut Plastic Love; Bedroomdisco wrote that its title comes from the band’s travels in Japan, Vietnam and South Korea. Its second single was Say Yes Dog – Lies.
Impact and Reception
The reviews of Voyage were warm but mixed, and both German critics found the album’s single aesthetic growing uniform over its length. As an opener, though, Deep Space did what it was meant to do: it showed Bedroomdisco straight away where the journey was heading. Start the album here, and wait for the rocket.
