Speak Loud
Bob Moses
An instruction more than a request — "Speak Loud" advocates for volume in a world that asks certain people, in certain emotional registers, to be quieter and smaller than their feeling warrants. The production is correspondingly more assertive than most Bob Moses material: percussion hitting with genuine weight, an arrangement building outward rather than inward, less implosion and more expansion. The track's social dimension is more present than in their typically private emotional territory — this speaks to being heard before being understood, volume as the first requirement before the second becomes possible. Howie's delivery has an urgency that reads as encouragement as much as personal expression, positioned as address to someone other than himself, which is relatively unusual in a catalog that typically speaks inward toward private reckoning. Vallance builds an arrangement with the quality of a room that suddenly quiets at exactly the right moment — the contrast between noise and silence doing the emotional work that language reaches for and doesn't quite achieve. As a closing statement the track carries particular force: an instruction you take with you out of the listening context and into whatever comes after the music stops, the volume persisting internally after the external sound has ended.
medium
2010s
assertive, expansive, punchy
Canadian / North American
Electronic, Indie Electronic. Deep house. Assertive, Encouraging. Builds from instruction to expanding affirmation, uses contrast between noise and sudden silence to deliver the emotional weight language alone cannot. energy 7. medium. danceability 6. valence 7. vocals: urgent, outward-facing, encouraging, socially addressed, direct. production: heavy percussion, expanding arrangement, dynamic noise-silence contrast. texture: assertive, expansive, punchy. acousticness 2. era: 2010s. Canadian / North American. When you need an instruction to take into the world — permission to be as loud as the feeling warrants.