song obsession :: i'll kill her

this week's song obsession is an archly escalating fantasy from a girl about a boy who's taken up with a different girl. fucking men.

soko - i'll kill her

but actually, in this case, it's the other woman who earns the wrath of the scorned, and rightfully so, since men are easily manipulated and therefore cannot be at fault. ever. proper assignment of blame isn't why this song succeeds, though. the reason it works - well, okay, it's multi-factorial and a large part is, must be, the discordance between the ideal of a sweet, forsaken girl who, rather than crumbling at a lost love, promises instead a violent reckoning. (and seems to mean it.) perhaps more importantly, though, are the small flights of imagination, the details - domestic, vivid - of a romance played in fast forward from an early blush of promise. what starts with a missed date for the cinema intensifies, in the space of three plus minutes, to a matured family planning: "i would have met your dad, i would have met your mum, she would have said please can you make some beautiful babies, so we would have had a boy called tom and a girl called susan, born in japan." (what a splendid touch, that born in japan tag, no?) and who hasn't indulged such wild fantasies far, far earlier than necessarily appropriate? it's part and parcel of the excitement of a new relationship & something soko both reaffirms and cleverly subverts.

soko doesn't have an album yet but you can check in on her, hear a couple more tunes (take special note of "i will never love you more"), over here or check out a performance of "i'll kill her" here.