Ironic enjoyment turns unironic after a while. My friend’s WhatsApp group has been “ironically” sharing Christmas music almost every Monday and Friday since the end of October, but there’s only so many versions of “All I Want for Christmas” to go through until everyone starts digging through Spotify playlists for something different, I mean, *someone* out there has to be making new songs for the holidays, right?
Well, sitting somewhere on a Spotify playlist, between your Carrie Underwoods and Justin Biebers, my friend Fabiola found something fresh and special: Enter Elli Moore and her single “Snow Angel” – a positively contagious and colorful indie Pop single that will slake your sleighbell thirst once and for all.
The Name rang familiar but I couldn’t quite place it anywhere, so I had to dig around and not only did I find a Spotify with almost 200k monthly listeners, but a magical retro-styled music video to go along with the song. The video took me back to the old VHS Christmas movies mom used to rent(chromatic aberration is indeed, a mood) and that I guess was a conscious choice on behalf of director Patrick Walsh, who clearly understood the homework laid out to him: “This song has an authentic and optimistic Christmas spirit, why not try a little stylish nostalgia?” With well over 170k views on Youtube (at the time of this article), I feel like I’m just in time to bring the jolly vibes behind “Snow Angel” to more folks.
I could go on about the excellent qualities in production, how gorgeous her voice is, and how catchy the lyrics are, but that’s not what I feel like really makes the song stand out to me. What I believe really makes this song special is a quality that l is often difficult to find in a lot of contemporary music, and that is a sense of candid timelessness in lyricism. What I mean is that this song could just as easily have been written in the 1940s or the 1970s, and we would be talking about an amazing pop cover to a classic today instead.
If I say that the song is “innocent” I mean it with the highest possible praise, it’s unspoiled by the often-times suffocating world we live in today, where everything seems to be unspokenly obligated to reflect some aspect of turmoil whether internal and personal or external and universal. I really like that this song exists in a winter wonderland where everything is cozy and alright. I’ll go back to cynicism later! For the time being, I’m allowed to put this on my December playlist while I dig through the rest of Elli Moore’s catalog, who -if you ask me- sounds just like a pop titan in the making.
Story: Samuel Aponte Photos: Courtesy of the artist
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