A few weeks later,
I’ve got Z2, and am happier than a UC Santa Cruz sophomore at a Widespread
Panic show in Amsterdam. Zaza remain as unbelievably slick as ever, their
songs such letter-perfect examples of pop form that they should be taught
in schools. They’ve “matured,” which means that they or their
producers recognize that nobody cares about the Spice Girls anymore and
therefore it’s inadvisable for a group to sound like the Spice Girls.
Their new sound is generally more laid-back, less overwhelming in its explosive
teen-pop enormity. The best song, whose title I cannot tell you as my efforts
to learn Thai have been truly lackluster if well-intentioned, hoists a new-jack
beat from the unwritten future of Bell Biv Devoe and reminds us of an underdiscussed
era when dumb pop songs were more suffusive of the general environment than
they are now; the song features a three-note descending guitar triad that
repeats twice and then lands not at its root but a step above it, and a
sampled yelp that’s used with more restraint (every eight measures
or so) than much else you’ll hear on any pop chart anywhere. The singers
demonstrate that they’ve learned how to swing without calling attention
to themselves, and to paint subtler shades of yearning. It’s just a
killer song, really, and I have no new insights to offer about Zaza or about
listening to the pop music of another culture or about the disorienting
anonymity of songs one finds floating around in cyberspace. I just relearned,
as a spring storm softened the ground underneath the new grass, that there’s
a girl group in Thailand whose skills in their chosen field are pretty peerless,
and I thought you might want to know.
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