sian_wI confess that although I heard about this band not long ago, I never actually listened to them straight away. HUGE mistake. It took me finding out that one of their songs was featured my favourite TV show to make me sit down and listen. I’m glad I did. Daughter is made up of Elena Tonra for the vocals and Igor Haefeli on guitar. I think what first attracted me to this band, after listening to their song ‘Medicine’ from ‘The Wild Youth-EP’, was the haunting simplicity of it; indeed most of their songs have a beautiful eerie quality to them. Almost as if you’re transported to the very heart and soul of the song itself. You can feel it, feel the undertones of the song. And ‘Medicine’ demonstrates that incredibly well.
The opening lines of the song resonate heavily with me:
‘Pick it up, pick it all up and start again. You’ve got a second chance, you could go home, escape it all. It’s just irrelevant.’
Albeit a slightly melancholy song, it nevertheless has moments of, dare I say it, clarity. It’s a song that seems to in fact, be giving us a second chance. At what, it depends. Whether people feel the song describes a lost love, a time in their life they miss, an opportunity they missed, or something that brought them down.
Elena Tonra’s vocals do justice to what I think are beautiful lyrics; her almost quiet tone of voice breathes over the piano backing and the beats that almost sound like heavy breathing. For me this makes the song more inviting; her vocals stand out with a simple beat in the background, focussing entirely on the words and their meaning.
Just listen to the lyrics:
‘You’ve got a warm heart, you’ve got a beautiful brain, but it’s disintegrating.’ Of course this may seem like it’s describing a mental breakdown almost, but for me it represents how we all feel sometimes: a little bit lost. We feel fine in ourselves for most of the time, but we have these moments when we question things, we think we’re not doing our best, in fact that we don’t know what we’re doing. Not only this but the line ‘you’ve got a beautiful brain, but it’s disintegrating’ for me represents society today. We are all intelligent, we all have brains, but we’re led to think that if we don’t ace tests, if we don’t get the best grades, if we do something that isn’t ‘intellectual’ we’re not clever. It’s not true. Everyone has a beautiful brain.
The next part of the song is even more hauntingly beautful:
‘You could still be, what you want to, what you said you were when I met you.’ I bet we all have dreams and wishes inside of us. But sometimes we’re forced to, not by people, but often by ourselves, into thinking these dreams can’t become reality, so we don’t think we can be that person we want to. We think it’s easier to let go of these dreams.
So I would recommend taking some time out of your day to not only listen to this song but the whole album; the haunting vocals and melodic nature of the song will captivate you and you can see for yourself the beauty in it. It may not be the happiest of songs, but it made me feel a bit better about myself, about what I think, what I believe in.
