Faye Webster. Photo courtesy of Eat Humans
The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.
Faye Webster works best in grayscale. While her music is vibrant, the relationships and emotions that populate her songs are never clearly defined in black or white. She’s penned paeans to hanging out with people you like but don’t like that much, and opened her breakout record running neither hot nor cold, but “Room Temperature.”
Her fantastic new single “But Not Kiss is damn near ecstatic in that ambiguity, but it’s not a song about indecision. Webster knows exactly what she wants, and what she doesn’t want; it just so happens that in doing so she ends up in yet another liminal space. Between friends and lovers, or between lovers and something more. She cares for whoever she’s singing about, but not enough to ask how they’re doing.
And yet, for all the hedging, “But Not Kiss” is bold and forceful. After a few tentative seconds, “I want to sleep in your arms…,” a full band breaks down the doors to Webster’s emotional holding cell. There’s plenty of her signature pedal steel, and bolero piano stabs that recall latter-day Arctic Monkeys, especially “There’d Better Be A Mirrorball“ (although credit where credit’s due — it might be more accurate to say that latter-day Arctic Monkeys are doing their best Faye Webster impersonation).
In the song’s music video, Webster looks uncannily like a young Alex Turner. Could that be more than a coincidence, or am I just overthinking things? Webster overthinks things too, so I’m sure she’d forgive my conspiracy theorizing. After all, she’s playing the commitment-phobe here. Maybe she’s been burned before, and wants to know she can finally trust someone. Maybe she’s the one not to be trusted.
