Alright, buckle up buttercups, because Kelsie Kimberlin’s new single, “Sally,” just landed, and it’s… well, it’s a thing. A brightly colored, intensely felt, pop-fueled thing. Genre? Pop, straight up, with Kimberlin’s voice front and center. No surprise there, she’s described as an “American pop sensation,” after all.
The core of “Sally” orbits around the heavy stuff: clawing your way back from the abyss of mental health challenges, finding strength after loss, and the particular resilience of girls facing the horrors of war. That’s a lot to pack into one pop song. Did she achieve it? It depends.
The journey presented in the song is … stark. It is about, a girl named Sally I am assuming, transforming from shattered to…sexually liberated. That’s the arc. Despair to empowerment, with a rather large emphasis on the, ahem, physical expression of that empowerment. Did I just stumble into a discussion about Flemish tapestries? No? Okay, moving on.
It’s like she found a hidden trapdoor in a cathedral and decided to redecorate it with neon paint. It’s jarring, sure. But is it effective? The contrast presented, between the traumatized beginning and the… confident ending… is undeniably potent. I think that at least she is saying something real here, but at the same time, what if socks made great hats? Think about it, they already conform to foot-shape, easy change for the cranium…
The music itself, it’s pure pop, meticulously crafted. But the theme… it feels like Kelsie Kimberlin handed us a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are from a serene landscape and the other half are…well… from a completely different puzzle. One you might find locked in a drawer labeled “Do Not Open Until the Apocalypse.”
So, is “Sally” a triumph? A confusing misstep? Maybe it’s both, swirling together like a particularly potent cocktail of hope and… well, you know. What does a cloud sound like when nobody is there to film it?
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