Maggie Andrew Releases Sweet & Sour Suave-Pop EP 'DAY JOB'
Bouncing between the Bay of Fundy and bayside-Los Angeles is not your typical artist version of bi-coastal, and even more peculiar for someone whose artist dreams were curated between coffee shop jobs and running away from home. For the now-Nova Scotia-based Maggie Andrew, this journey has proved to be a fertile one: a bandwagon of experiences that have grown into an eight-song extended play, a near album filled to the brink with suave pop eclectic goodness.
The EP in question, DAY JOB, is a proper resume of incandescently irreverent storytelling. There’s a romp of frustration, bent intentions, and buoyed sexuality in its sound – a sonic realization of lifestyle experiments gone awry – with a positive dose of big brother energy that boomerangs to near-surreal oddities. The title single, "DAY JOB" is a humorous but harsh assessment of early artist life. Its punchy, light punk rhythm backs a lyricism that is inherently dramatic, a quality that is constant throughout the EP, no matter the genre template. "Better than You" is a song that sounds like bubblegum pop, but reads way more vengeful-diary when you dig in. That dichotomy again is a ribbon binding the full work, sweet in sound but sour in lyrics: funny but painful.
The EP is a real switchback of emotions, containing a huge range of sounds, all woven together with a poet's eye for human crisis – maybe more precisely the eye of the beholder. It’s bawdy and plussed up one moment, like on “Biting Ice Cream,” and the next vulnerable and compromised, in tracks such as "Hurt Myself." One of the standouts of the EP is "Time in Space," a wonderful duet that allows Maggie’s vocal talent to come to the forefront but equally showcases the nascent talent BASYL. The song bridges worlds and perspectives in a somber but understanding way. A single from last year "Come Clean" follows, a heartbreak soundtracked by choppy drums and muted guitars. "That Bitch" is some hip-pop bliss, a lady-affronted journey into destroying everyone’s ego, and Maggie’s cadence has the gravitas to sound graceful doing so. Ending on "About Us," a proper power ballad, another chapter in the diversity of the EP and Maggie’s songwriting imagination. After the twenty minutes plus of DAY JOB, one reveals itself; Maggie Andrew is a wonderful lyrical and vocal talent whose best work is ahead of her, and we are glad she quit her day job to gift us her talent.
Listen to DAY JOB below:
