‘Lessons of Chiron’ is a full-length album by Bridget Mariie. I don’t have a lot of information about the artist, even though I did some online detective work. And you know what? I don’t mind at all. Maybe they want to let their music do the talking, or perhaps they are lazy and/or shy. But I appreciate all of the above. I grew up before social media and the internet, and I sometimes miss the certain mystique surrounding artists. It makes you make up stories about them and what they’re about, and most importantly, it makes you focus on the music.
While having these thoughts, I started listening to the album on YouTube. The first song, ‘Dialtone’, is a music video. I am like, “Is this a direct reference to Bergman’s 7th Seal?”(a movie, for those of you who don’t know, where the protagonist plays chess with Death on a beach, but in the music video, she is playing chess with herself). I loved that because, for me, it creates some goth vibes in the way she presents herself, which were kind of obvious to me already, but now I have the visual to support my case 🙂
Now, this is relatively straightforward music but quite tricky to classify. So here is my take. Imagine you’re at a beach, and you have some surfers, punks and some goths smoking weed together. And you’re looking to play some music on a cassette player (it HAS to be a cassette player for this to work) that everyone will like and sway to, maybe even dance to. Well, this album would be the perfect soundtrack to that.
To get more technical, I am putting on my producer/engineer hat. Guitars, bass and drums are the instruments here. The lines and arrangements remind me of The Cure, a bit of Siouxsie Sioux, as well as the effects on the vocals. That is a very characteristic slap-back delay there. However, there is also some 1960s psychedelia present, as well as synth-wave and shoegaze elements.
There you go; I just gave you the recipe for this tasty treat. I found it very interesting, and I thoroughly enjoyed the album.
Last but not least, let’s nerd out a little bit. I am Greek and actually well-read in mythology, but to my anglophone sisters and brothers, if you think the artist just misspelt Charon here, think again! Chiron is the centaur (half man, half horse, come on, keep up with this!) who is perhaps the most sophisticated of his kind and was the teacher of many heroes like Achilles and Jason.
So Bridget is passing on to us the lessons she got from this mythical creature, or it’s random, or we are being trolled. It’s a misspelling, but in any case, I love it when there is a lot to discover in an album than just choruses and sing-alongs.
My favourite tracks of mine: ‘Anything’ and ‘Not Romantic’.
Written by Spiros Maus
