Starting off in a manner that separates you from the noises of your world and takes you into a sound of the world it aims to build, ‘David’ by Mazmere is a deeply vulnerable, a deeply raw song that explores pain and loss to intense musicality.
The song, in its sound, leans towards a post-punk sound, a soft grunge sound, and includes a lot of shoegaze elements. A deliberate restraint is maintained in the song, as you imagine the song to burst into a cathartic section and the song does not. Instead, it makes you simmer and circle about in the same melancholic distortion laden sound. In a way it mimics the cyclical nature of grief itself. You might expect grief to be this big outburst of emotions, but in reality it has you going quiet and has your mind going loud with memories and unsaid words.
The song through its calculated restraint and minimal straying from the core sound, captures that whirlpool that grief feels like. Nothing is grand and epic in the song’s instrumentation, as it uses distorted guitars and light percussion and endless fuzzy shoegaze textures. In doing so, it mirrors what it feels like to lose a loved person. The conversation-like vocals also feel like a letter that one writes, one that cannot be sent – it is a letter that is full of questions as one tries to grapple with what has happened. The vocals are very raw, and hold immense vulnerability and grief in their quietness.
If you have lost someone in your life, you will be able to feel every riff, every distortion, every lyric, every heavy restraint in the song. It is a truly spectacular song, as it manages to capture a kind of humaneness that very few songs are able to.