Boyskout "The Model"

The female voice singing “The Model” (mp3) appeals to me in certain unmentionable places. Perhaps it’s the alluring timbre or its knowledge of its own androgynous cool, which of course leads to the unmistakable acknowledgment of Nico, and a lyric like “She’s a model and she’s looking good, I’d like to take her home, that’s understood,” that opens the song. It’s a well-composed and thought-out character sketch, sort of the opposite of the Rubicks song of similar thematics I posted over the summer. Where the singer of “Actress Model” was a torrent of breathlessness, the woman from Boyskout is a model (so to speak) of disaffection in the presence of narrow physical beauty. The fact that her voice meshes perfectly with the music surrounding it—a simple, cool, loping and cyclical moody buzz—eliminates any tension whatsoever between the song’s components, and emphasizes the unironic encouragement in a line like “she does the best she can.” She’s a supporter but not an enthusiast, someone smart enough to understand what’s going on, the constructs et al, but isn’t afraid to say that she’s still enamored—the sort of feeling that Belle and Sebastian explored with much more lyrical detail in their song of the same title, or the feeling that a show like America’s Next Top Model relies upon for its success.

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