by Selina Yang (@y_aniles)
Platinum hair, Adidas tracksuit clad, we follow Gemma Fleet’s (vocals) lone walk through Glaswegian meadows. “Chill Pill” is the coldest and sharpest track on Glaswegian quartet Dancer’s latest EP, As Well. The video is no more warm than the song itself. In 1.5x speed and interspersed with blasts of a lo-fi painting filter, Fleet tromps around like a disaffected teenager kicking pebbles at flocks of sheep. Fleet is Cathy on the moors, the Wuthering Heights heroine overtaken by nervous tension rather than doomed love. It’s almost a scene of rural idyll: stormy lavender clouds hovering over the shelter of post-industrial ruins.
Rather than an attempt to clear the head, the walk breeds antsiness. “Chill Pill”’s opening recalls the skeleton of a B-52’s Wild Planet era dance beat, but stripped down of 80s glam to a nervy dilapidated core. A hint of pop punk attitude, even. The rest of As Well demonstrates the band’s mastery of optimistic warmth, on tracks “Love” and “Cordon Bleau” – “Chill Pill” is their testament to angst. Compared to the rest of the EP’s arpeggiated flirting with math rock, “Chill Pill,” like the song name itself, is most minimalistic. Gavin Murdoch’s bony drumline steers the buzzy guitars off kilter. In outro, this buzz rises to a fuzzed out wall of major chords, adding the throughline of optimism from the rest of the EP into this otherwise dissonant track.
Fleet, breaking the fourth wall, storms into the camera to deliver the biting thesis statement: “I need to chill out”. Her face twists into a half smile, half grimace, cartoonishly exaggerated by the high contrast filter. When delivering her tumbling spoken word stanzas, it’s as if the anxious logic thinks faster than she can speak: “I’m a loose wheel and space cadet, I have memories I want to forget”. Pent up energy is demonstrated in all of its forms: a frustrated walk, sardonic laughter, tumbling denial. “Chill Pill” translates this into the itch to dance.