Striking to life with a bittersweet swing that will only grow more intriguing as the next few minutes go by, there’s no stopping Blake Langdale’s “Streets” once it gets started. From the spindly pop backbone it enjoys to the flourishing colors its lead vocalist gives us around every twist and turn in the beat, it’s hard to determine whether or not this emotionally-charged power ballad was intended to be a stab at pop music greatness or simply designed to be a confessional piece independent from genres entirely. It’s a lyrical masterpiece, but in addition to its broad poeticisms invites some comparisons to the existential pop/rock of mid-2000s Europe, particularly in how it amalgamates what appear to be electronica influences with something a bit more straight-up and acoustic in style.

Langdale isn’t the first singer/songwriter that I’ve heard in my career to have had a difficult sound to categorize, but it’s perhaps the way he layers his influences together in this single that makes it all the more interesting to decipher what his goal really was. The framework is as electropop as it gets without serving as a throwback to a more vintage sound, but the kick we get out of the harmonies and the percussive pulsations that frame them is absolutely more of the rock n’ roll variety than it is anything else in the spectrum of genres. I don’t usually like hybridity this late in the year, but in “Streets,” this singer makes himself to likeable for me to resist his experimental ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0nU0rjoBlU

The music video for “Streets” is a pleasant enough document that takes the concept of the song and puts it into living color before our eyes, but I don’t think that any one of its shots makes the single feel or sound any different than it does on its own. There’s already so much emotion here that it’s reasonable to credit all of the passion here to Langdale’s voice exclusively – even though that’s clearly not the case – and ultimately I think this actually speaks volumes about his skill as a singer. He’s nowhere near being a household name at this point, but he’s still managing to give us the kind of high caliber performance I would anticipate from a major label star.

“Streets” concludes simply enough and doesn’t overstay its welcome at a conservative running time of three and a half minutes in total length, but when all is said and done, its effects on listeners tend to be robust to say the least. Blake Langdale works some serious magic on an otherwise black and white composition in
“Streets” that has made me very interested in finding out how he’s going to broach the notion of a full length studio album in the near future, and depending on how long he spends outside of the recording process, I think he’s going to be a prime player to watch in 2021. This is a good time to be in the indie pop business, and content like his latest release is going to prove that to Langdale very soon.

John McCall