Crossovers in rock, by nature, tend to be more emotional than straight-up rockabilly music is, but this genre provides a platform for contemporary balladry that is virtually unmatched in Western music today. Players like Vili V are giving audiences quite the revolution in melodic songwriting in 2024, and despite a plethora of synthesized content coming down the pipes from mainstream artists, the indie pulse is winning over listeners with purist harmonies ala singles like the stylish “Constellation High,” currently out everywhere indie rockabilly is sold and streamed. Vili’s latest release is a thorough combination of both retro and modern country/pop concepts, and it perhaps summarizes the main reason why music of its type has been seeing such a strong uptick this year.
The arrangement of the instruments in this single is honestly a little more complex than I would normally expect from a crossover rockabilly song, but even the dissonance it contributes to the music has a purpose within the narrative. Instead of simply using poeticisms to create an emotional connection between himself and the audience, Vili is using everything from the beat to the interactions between his vocals and the guitar to drive home a sense of intimacy in this master mix.
Leading the way with the melodic presence of his voice, the substance of his story in this track starts and ends with the heart he’s putting into the performance, and not the bells and whistles one would come in contact with in most FM rockabilly music this season.
There’s an eagerness in the lead vocal that doesn’t translate to undue aggression in “Constellation High,” but instead something a little more frustrated than lyrics would initially imply. Vili at times sounds like even the retrospective commentary he divvies out behind the mic is more of a statement of facts than it is a comforting memory, and it’s only through his pushiness with the beat that we’re able to appreciate how much angst he’s carrying on his shoulders. Several unspoken emotions are lying just beneath the surface in this song – yearning, melancholy, and reflection just to name a few – but as subtle as they are, they never remain obstructed by instrumental frills in the performance at all.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/constellation-high/1726285225?i=1726285226
Raw emotion is the order of the day for Vili V in “Constellation High,” and I didn’t need to have ever heard his music before to understand how much he’s putting on the line in this single. At the end of the day, this is a piece made of both simple and sophisticated ingredients, and if it were performed by a player other than the man who wrote it, I can’t picture it having the same effect it’s going to inevitably have with him at the helm. Vili is just a likable guy in this song; someone I would even go so far as to call universally relatable from a rockabilly perspective, and though his style probably won’t dominate the charts this spring, it doesn’t have to to raise plenty of attention in the Canadian underground.
Kim Muncie