Less than a year after the release of his full-length debut, ‘I Barely Know Her’, which was performed live in Spain with two concerts in Madrid and Barcelona, Sombr continues to release new material. Consolidating ‘Homerecker’ as a success -and as one of their best singles-, whose video clip we have analyzed in depth, now comes ‘Potential’.
In this case the joke is made by itself: ‘Potential’ had a lot of “potential”, but it once again affects the same questionable decisions that until now have been defining Sombr’s proposal: excess production – especially reverb – and a strange lyrical vagueness.
‘Potential’ does not completely separate itself from the sound of ‘Homerecker’ and other songs on the album such as ’12 to 12′, since it is again built on a tempo close to disco music, only that the instrumentation of guitars, drums and reverb takes us more to the most expansive indie rock and classic pop. Sombr brand, in short. In its favor it must be said that its sound is not so common in the mainstream.
Then it is true that some production ideas are somewhat forced, like that vocoder similar to that of Daft Punk that enters at specific moments, and above all the lyrics of heartbreak once again transmit a void. It’s not that it doesn’t count for anything (it’s pop, after all), but that, in search of a certain universality, it turns out to be somewhat stereotyped and flat.
Passages like “Every time we woke up / I could see you without makeup” or “It was a difficult breakup, but I wrote some songs that made me famous” develop from a complete lack of concreteness; the specific reference to his fame or the typical nostalgic allusion (“that’s how we grew up”) try to infer depth to a song that really doesn’t have any, no matter how grandiose it sounds. And it sounds like that, without a doubt.
