The Pop Phenomenology of the Cry-Voice: Duologue’s “Push It”

I first heard this song months ago. Duologue released the video for “Push It” featuring the actor Robert Sheehan (Misfits, Killing Bono, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones), so, being the fan of Mr. Sheehan that I am, I watched the video (the video below is a different version). The full album, Song & Dance, was released recently, and I’ve been listening to it. It’s pretty damn great. But this song remains my favorite so far, and it’s because of a few elements that, when combined, are a formula for winning Jillian’s heart.

“Push It” has this quiet build that you can’t really help but compare to other current pop/folk-rock songs (yep, there’s a piano and some strings), but the crescendo of the music leads you to a crest that is neither jarring nor explosive; there is no moment of folk-rock fist-pumping bad-assery, and I think that makes the song special in its difference. Don’t get me wrong; I love folk-rock bad-assery and fist-pumping. I’m delighted that cellos, violins, pianos, and violas are featuring prominently in rock music; after all, these are the instruments that are most likely to make me want to curl up in a corner and cry my face off when I hear them…cry my face off in a good way, of course. But this song is bad ass in its own way because it presses ever onward; there is no fist-pump because there is no break for one because this song doesn’t give you time to rest. Indeed, the wonderful blending of guitar, piano, and violin with a synth-pop underlay creates sounds that dance around each other, that twirl and spin and blanket you in a cloud of happy-sad, all while this strong, yet mildly tremulous voice is there tamping down a little path in the cloud for you to follow. That path leads to goosebumps.

Tom Digby-Bell, the band’s singer, has what I like to call a “cry-voice,” and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s a voice that at times bears resemblance to the voice of Thom Yorke or Alex Trimble, though it occupies its own space somewhere in between. I call his a cry-voice because there are moments in the song when I am quite certain the man’s going to break down; it is in that split-second of wonder, where his voice threatens to become a whine but doesn’t; where I expect his voice to break, but it doesn’t; where hell, that note could topple over into laughter but it doesn’t, that I feel a chill move through me.

This song demands my attention as if there is some secret it wants to reveal to me. It makes me feel as though if I keep listening over and over, I will uncover the secret. With each replay the urgency engendered by the collision of those instruments with that voice grows, so that whenever I reach the 4:34 mark, when Digby-Bell hits this glorious high note, I feel both exhausted and exhilarated. It’s a moment of ecstatic revelation, of beautiful desperation, wherein I finally learn the secret but can’t articulate it. It’s like when you can’t remember something, and it’s right on the tip of your brain, and it’s driving you mad, and then you finally remember it, and you feel an intoxicating mixture of relief and fatigue from having spent so much energy on remembering. That’s how this song makes me feel. It’s painful and perfect.