Week in Pop: Caicos, Romantic Thriller, YASSOU

Post Author: Sjimon Gompers

Saw Tooth Wave

Up close & personal with Saw Tooth Wave’s Cris Cordero; photographed by Tyler Dacey.

Music is one of those mysterious things that imitates life and in turn can life can also imitate the movements & materialization of music. Exhibiting this symbiotic relationship is LA artist Cris Cordero who creates under the moniker Saw Tooth Wave, presenting the world premiere for the grandiose single “The Human Condition”. Diligently working on the upcoming A Safe Place For Feelings EP available this winter that follows up 2017’s Ghost EP; Cordero makes songs that are assembled from a place of personal therapy & heart-held hopes that strive to rise out of cycles of self-destruction & the ruts we as humans find ourselves in. With an approach that is not your average bedroom pop, Cris creates with a very precise economy of instrumental arrangements sail upward out of one’s humble confines toward greater enlightened heights of pure possibilities.
A powerful core progression is the central force that drives the course of Saw Tooth Wave’s “The Human Condition” along with a host of metaphors that pertain to water sources & receptacles. The fascinating elements at work here is how Cris Cordero composes the track as something from an off-Broadway production that blends a rock-opera style centerpiece with an arrangement that retains all the DIY components that make up the kind of anomaly that could set the college charts ablaze. Every chord is felt like something of an emotive subtext in a song that exhibits aspects of vulnerability, processes of growth, healing & more where the conundrum of coping with life’s burdens is embodied in the lyrical motif of drinking from a dirty water tap. This water source becomes symbolic of all the things that bring us down in our quest for daily subsistence & survival (just think for a minute of all the crap that is in any municipal water source straight from the tap) delivered in lines of uncertainty with it’s a shot in the dark on cheering you up, are you filling your heart or just filling your cup? to reaching out in passages like, it’s the human condition that’s bringing me down, are you calling my bluff, can you please calm me down. Saw Tooth Wave works to find greater sources of life & resources that are truly fulfilling for the heart, body, mind & spirit that are beyond the corrosive so-called comforts of convenience & short term senses of gratification. Cris Cordero introduces the debut of the “The Human Condition” with the following thoughts:

This song took longer than most songs for me to write and record. It’s about my past self destructive behavior and habits, and not knowing how to deal with life’s issues. I used to be pretty bad to myself and I think I’m finally learning how to stop doing that.

Cris Cordero of Saw Tooth Wave; photographed by Sunset Karner.

Listen to more from Saw Tooth Wave via Soundcloud.