Since the success of "Alice", music producer, remix master and plunderphonics expert Pogo (Nick Bertke) has been highly popular with animation studios. His ability to capture the essence of a film by remixing voice and sound samples into a coherent song has garnered collaborations beyond Disney: Pokemon, Spongebob and Pixar.
With his fifth album Kindred Shadows (2015), however, Pogo expands into a different terrain of popular culture: pop music. When I first listened to "No Worries", I didn't realize that the verses had been sampled from Adele's "Someone Like You": her verses had been clipped, her vocals had been altered to more ethereal, and the song's ambient downtempo beats bore little resemblance to the original song's sparse and sombre acoustic production:
'Taste it to know right off the (beg)Uninvited but IFound a girl and you're...Your dreams (your dreams)Came trueNothin' compares, no worriesT-to know right up the (beg)Uninvited but IFound a girl and you're...Your dreams (your dreams)Came trueNothin' compares, no worries'
Song lyrics:
And then there's the trip hop chorus, which was sampled from Pogo's own "Psycho Soup": a repetition of the refrain 'Get the bomb back' by a deep male baritone voice that you wouldn't expect to find in this melodic, dream pop-esque song. The verse/chorus combination seems somewhat incoherent on a semantic level, but the contrast has a pleasing sonic quality: an unexpected duet between polar opposites that somehow just works. This is the kind of music you can spend hours daydreaming to.
