By Kavit Sumud | December 28th, 2012
Digits‘ new track, “Love is Only Affection,” has an intimacy which, at shallow glance, feels prosaic, hearkening back to the sonic landscapes of 80′s odes to heartbreak. But as soon as the lyrics kick in, you’ll quickly tell the track is revolutionary.
In the first stanza, Digits captures the emotionally wrongheaded approach of most love songs when he opines, “You’re always so caught up inside of love/That you lose yourself inside it/Even when you think you’re in control/You can never step outside it.” And by doing so, he is able to set himself outside the confines of a love song by straddling the dichotomy of his logical lyrics and the effuse electro-pop of Reagan-Era romances. In many ways, he’s the anti-Chad Valley.
But while Digits’ minimalist approach to electro art-pop allows him to play the outsider to what he imagines (and I would as well) as a world full of lovers injecting Shakespeare’s Puck’s blood directly into their veins — bouncing around on each other like out of control fools — his track is anything but unromantic. In his sombre exploration as “Love [As] Only Affection,” he finds that there is no alterative to the love game; and while “that doesn’t mean there is nothing greater,” by the time you spend time in Digits’ outsidery world, you’ll be able to look at love in a whole new manner.
It’s a love song for grown-ups, one which I could only hope would spawn a music revolution…