WTSH is especially pleased to offer this exclusive premiere
of “Goodbye Roby”, the latest single from the somewhat cryptic New York City
venture LLOLLYANNA.
This project first crossed our radar by way of December’s ingenious “Down by Design”.
Like its predecessor, “Goodbye Roby” takes various ‘gaze values—distortion,
reverb, haze—and pushes them, as one might say, “up to eleven.” In the resulting
sonic mayhem, a barbed guitar line provides canvas for catchy, pretty
pop melodies while boomed arpeggios and thunderous percussion shake the
sock-hop dance floor to a point just short of rupture and collapse. It’s a
veritable pop storm, or perhaps a pop quake: if we were a pinball machine, we’d
be crying “TILT!”, but in a good way.
The artist lets us in on the fact that “Goodbye Roby” takes
inspiration from the Dion classic “Runaround Sue”. “Demo versions had lots of ‘Hey hey
bum day day day day hey heys,’” he tells us. “I took them out because they
never mixed right. But basically that’s it. A Dion song that would rip your
head off.” Some of the melodies remind us of The Beach Boys, an influence the
artist also acknowledges. “Goodbye Roby” will lead off an upcoming EP called
Tarot Waltz. More on LLOLLYANNA very soon.
