“Sure you've been having fun/ At my expense/ Time is a loaded gun and I'm on the fence”: North London-based singer-songwriter Chelou entertains some poetically dark and disturbing thoughts on his new track “Damned Eye See”. Inspired by newspaper headlines that convinced him that “shit's going south...", the song’s lyrics expresses a thoroughly jaded, pessimistic, and world-weary perspective: “For me, the track’s about all the doom and gloom we seem to be surrounded by at the moment in the news and on social media etc.” (Wonderland).
There’s no space for politicking or sloganeering here, just a morose lamentation of the moral ambivalence and loneliness one has to cope with: ‘Kill your friend/ Sadly I find I'm still alive at the end/ Did you taste their pain/ Spare me the crime until it's time to pretend’.
As with his viral hit “Halfway to Nowhere” earlier this year, however, there is a sliver of silver to counterpoint this grey cloud of introspective electronica. Chelou sampled the voice of his eight year old sister to lend a more innocent and optimistic foil to his cynicism, which is also contrasted with the song’s delicate guitar line and sparkly synths. In the accompanying music video, his animated protagonist undergoes several disorienting and traumatizing experiences, but arrives at a hard-won and well-earned solace at the very end.
