For an artist who has spent the better part of six years releasing genre-hopping indie projects, Dorian seems surprisingly uninterested in hewing to the contemporary dance-pop blueprint.
From a bouncy bassline, pristine synth textures, layered backup vocals, a singalong-ready chorus that seems expressly designed to compel you to the nearest dancefloor-but what distinguishes OOO from the seemingly endless pile of algorithmically optimized “summer anthems” cluttering the airwaves and streaming services is its embrace of the dramatic, and “dramatic” here is used as the highest possible compliment. At its core, OOO is a story of a lovers’ squabble. Not of the kind of soul-shattering, life-altering fallout that compels an artist to venture out into the woods for a twelve-minute folk epic performed into the middle distance, but the annoying sort, in which two equally stubborn parties stubbornly refuse to acknowledge they’ve done anything wrong despite their mutual desire to get back to how things were before all the fuss.
Dorian manages to spin this awkwardness into pure, ecstatic euphoria, viewing emotional turmoil not as a burden but as an excuse for a ridiculously stylish pity party. This push and pull are replicated in the track’s production: Verses, for instance, build with contained grooves before bursting into a chorus, which places Dorian’s own voice front and center-undoubtedly the artist’s greatest asset to this point: a voice theatrical enough to capture the song’s emotional urgency without straying into hyper-dramatization, which is surprisingly tricky to pull off on a song constructed with equal intent for headphones or for a packed club.
There are points in which OOO is bordering on audaciously maximalist, harmonies climbing higher as percussion splinters and flurries of notes scatter, the song grasping in every direction to find yet another catchy flourish to add to its growing repertoire. It mostly succeeds, although at times the arrangement does seem to be trying to win an argument simply on the merits of its volume.
If OOO is any indication of what is in store for Dorian on his upcoming album Reconnected, though, the singer isn’t looking to re-invent the dance-pop genre, but rather remind us why it was so compelling in the first place; colourful, genuine and heartbreakingly heartfelt, it is the sort of song that, at a moment when so many pop artists wrongly choose alienation and indifference to genuine feeling, refreshingly dances through the thorny landscape of a relationship’s messy, mid-argument terrain.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
