Track Premiere: Kellen of Troy “Heaven Online”

Who can you trust these days?  Sure, sure his name is Kellen – Kellen Wenrich (ask the bells of Shoreditch, baby) – but he’s from Nashville.  Maybe not originally, there’s a chance that a musician may have migrated their way to Nashville from some other locale.  But Troy?  Well, OK, maybe.  But we’re supposed to believe he has a direct line to the Alien’s Tripadvisor?  Although actually that does sound credible too:  “when the alien invaders eventually arrive / they’ll be a little disappointed with what they come to find /  this place doesn’t look anything like they said it was online.

Because this is not actually a song about alien invasions – it’s about the distorting capability of the Internet to misrepresent things (and yeah – we haven’t missed the irony embodied in this very mention) – and it achieves the delivery of that message with humour and mountain sized dollops of irony of its own.  We’ve been heard to mumble in the past about not wanting to hear songs “about your dog, your lovely kids or your goddamn cell ‘phone” – but this time we do.  Well, the cell ‘phone bit anyway.  Or as Kellen puts it :”I  don’t like social media. It’s a perpetual high school prom, a binary beauty pageant. It’s a mirage of #livingmybestlife and #authentic and #nofilter. It subjectifies facts. It echo-chambers opinion. It is a bumper sticker socio-political discourse that strives to out-woke the woke and out-patriot the patriotic. It has no patience for nuance or introspection, only likes and follows. It’s where the truth is fake news and fake news is the truth. It isolates in the name of community, divides in the name of unity, and alienates in the name of humanity.

Heaven Online‘ is taken from Kellen of Troy’s second album, the self-deprecatingly entitled ‘Vanity Project‘.

About Jonathan Aird 2895 Articles
Sure, I could climb high in a tree, or go to Skye on my holiday. I could be happy. All I really want is the excitement of first hearing The Byrds, the amazement of decades of Dylan's music, or the thrill of seeing a band like The Long Ryders live. That's not much to ask, is it?
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