Soft guitar progressions, crisp bass hits that are reminiscent of your favorite early 2000s pop-punk-grunge band, and dreamy, cascading vocals all fill your ears in the opening track of James Ivy’s debut EP, Good Grief!. “Headset Go,” along with each track in the five-song collection, is littered with influences from bands like Blink-182 and Green Day. What truly makes James Ivy worth your listening time is his ability to blend modern PC music/EDM with those same fast guitar and drum progressions that you’d expect from those classic pop-punk bands. Four of the five songs are entrenched with pop-styled melodies that will take homestead in your mind for days on end.
Ivy and his production partners Gavin Bendt, Luke Shippey, and Michael Stone deserve to be praised by the masses for the pristine genre-bending performance they curated in this EP. The third track, “Snakes,” truly exemplifies the excellence that the four minds produced. The layering in the track's bridge specifically caught my ear’s attention. The perfectly pitched “To make me feel," gliding over the static-y, choppy, infected-by-a-computer-virus-vocals that sang “I just want to feel something,” left me sitting in pure awe and envy. I felt as if I was Danny Phantom battling an evil singing cyborg while wrestling with my own inner demons.
I also found myself deeply enthralled by the poisonous serpent-filled-well that Ivy helps the listener envision in the same song. The metaphorical depiction represents Ivy’s ache to feel something when he’s at his lows in those angst-inducing situations, as well as what it feels like to have a partner who says they need you, but ultimately loves seeing you walk towards agony. The same internal and cooperative conflicts are explored in “Last Star." Ivy does a phenomenal job of masking the meaning of a song with a fraudulently joyous tonality, and wow, does it make me want to listen even more.
Last thing: Ivy killed everything, and proved his versatility heavily with “Dirt.” His soft, melodic vocals briskly glide over a consoling acoustic guitar as the second track greets your ears. Ivy slowly ushers you to a mild, heart-rate-pushing, thematic, and musical climax as he ponders his own death and says, “Into the dirt, I become Earth.” A wavering, mystical synthesizer subtly coats the same guitar progression that Ivy started the track with. I need more progressions and overall songs like this from Ivy. I ache for a track with the same thematic pattern.
Every aspect of the EP made me genuinely want one more thing: additional music to hold me over. Three phenomenal pre-releases left me hungry for at least three new tracks, as well. However, I am incredibly grateful that I have two new Ivy tracks to bump and a new EP to refer to my homies. I look forward to seeing Ivy climb the music totem pole — I would love to see him work with people like Jean Dawson, Boylife, and Jack Larsen. Since last Friday, I am happily, patiently waiting for more greatness from the king, James Ivy. Listen to Good Grief! NOW.
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