By: Joshua Pickard. He covers local and national music, film and other aspects of pop culture. You can contact him on Facebook, Twitter or by email. The opinions expressed in this column belong solely to the author, not Nooga.com or its employees.
Kindora has always been something of a musical chameleon, adapting and reinterpreting her influences to suit whatever mood or creative space in which she might find herself. Whether she was exploring some euphoric pop landscape or something more closely resembling a neon-streaked dance floor, her instincts have led her to some truly memorable places. Incorporating left-of-center dance pop movements and R&B-lit melodies, her work has always been complicated and utterly compelling. But her fans have come to expect this about her, this tendency toward pop obfuscation, and are inclined to see where she leads them.
Over the past handful of years, we’ve been privy to various singles, videos and the odd collection of songs from Kindora. And true to her unique creativities, they’ve all been mired in a wonderfully warped pop head space. She’s taken us through a morass of both slender and weighted beats and bits of vocal theatricality that captivate and overwhelm our senses. Recently, she’s been playing around with the balance between the aural and visual aspects of her music, creating videos which highlight the alluring strangeness of her pop tendencies as well as the fierce personal perspectives which have always been a part of her musical history.
On her latest EP, “5 for 5,” she continues to mine these otherworldly pop and R&B atmospheres, revealing a deeper understanding of their intricate connections than we’ve been presented with before. In video form, we’ve already been shown the decadent rhythms and whirling constructions of “Poser” and “Atmosphere,” two songs whose videos tell a dark story of kidnapping, vengeance and pillow fights. But we’ve heard this darkness before in her music, and Kindora is compelled to linger in its depths throughout this collection. These songs are not overtly desolate — they’re merely imbued with the idea that pop can be dangerous when requested and comforting when needed.
“Don’t Go” opens with a hazy guitar riff before evolving into a mixture of echoing vocals and fluorescent beats. It’s the kind of song that she excels at, one which draws attention to her tenacity in blending the opaque rhythmic shades of pop, R&B and electronic music. “I’m Shy” uses a deceptive simplicity to convey a broad emotional resonance; its foggy pop progression is mesmerizing and ethereal. Closing track “3 X 3” is R&B that’s been laced with liquid grooves and hypnotizing vocals. The song’s clacking beat meshes perfectly with the bounding bass that circulates around her. The EP is a luminous and weighted look at the effects that Kindora’s musical influences have had on her own personal experiences.
