Tag: Single Review: Trust

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Bel Cardin Shares Introspective “Trust”

22-year old Bel Cardin is an emerging, Raleigh-born and-based singer/songwriter. Coming from a family of music lovers, the young North Carolinian can trace the origins of their music career to when they picked up the guitar at 13. Raised on Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead and Elliott Smith, Cardin later fell in love with a collection of artists that emerged in the 2010s, drawing from those artists’ penchant for melodic and crisp guitar, slightly ambiguous song structures and meticulous lyrical imagery.

Cardin’s debut, 2023’s 10-song Petrify was a melancholy, guitar-driven batch of songs recorded at their college campus’ music studio.

The North Carolinian’s latest single “Trust” is the first single since the release of Petrify. Beginning with a lengthy, dreamily atmospheric introduction featuring strummed guitar and Cardin’s heartbreakingly tender delivery, “Trust” slowly builds into a thunderous climax and gentle fadeout. Seemingly drawing from the likes of Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail and others the new single thematically touches upon previously established themes of human nature, vices, loneliness and what it means to connect with the people around them.

Sonically, the new single sees Cardin taking a bold step forward in production and songwriting while retaining elements of her previously released material. It also marks the first track from a forthcoming sophomore album.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Over the past year, I’ve written quite a bit about the Los Angeles, CA-based indie pop project (and latest personal obsession of mine) Oddnesse, and as you may recall, the project comprised of singer/songwriter Rebeca Arango and producer Grey Goon can trace its origins to when both members individually relocated from the East Coast to Los Angeles after being in several failed bands. As the story goes, Arango and Goon bonded over a shared vision of beautiful and infectious music with a dark, heavy groove, and initially the project began as two friends jamming and experimenting with ideas before they began to take it as a serious endeavor.

Last month, I wrote about “I Used To,” an atmospheric and meditative track that centered around an ethereal arrangement of twangy guitar, gently droning synths and Arango’s ethereal crooning and while clearly nodding at 80s New Wave with Concrete Blonde and Siouxsie and the Banshees immediately coming to my mind, there was a subtly alt-country vibe that adds to cinematic proceedings. “Trust” the duo’s latest single, much like its predecessors is centered around a tight, hypnotic groove, featuring one of the best bass lines I’ve heard in a rock song to date, atmospheric synths, a sinuous guitar line played through washes of reverb and delay pedal paired with Arango’s come hither vocals and a razor sharp hook. And while continuing a run of subtly ambitious and well-crafted material, the song may be among their most straightforward and infectious pop songs to date that focuses on the swooning and wildly uncertain pangs of love — with the tacit understanding that love can make us all do some strange and unpredictable things.