Single Review | Jaicee Rentz – ‘Superzoomy Space Ships’
Teen songwriter Jaicee Rentz embodies home and heart on her sunny psych-pop single, ‘Superzoomy Space Ships’. The Californian has drawn apt comparisons to early Beck with telephone filter vocals on the verses and spacey ornamentations of blips and bloops that colour the track.
‘Superzoomy Space Ships’ is youthful energy encapsulated. The title is only one zany aspect of it – Rentz opens with a mooing cow toy saturated in delay before a single note is heard. Her goofy spirit carries on with alien space noises and all sorts of playful, electronic flourishes – an aficionado of the weird and wonderful in the lineage of CocoRosie.
At the core of the song is the contrast between her emerging maturity and the still-burning glow of childhood. Innocent melodies in the verse make way for sweeping, broader chants in the chorus with booming confidence and a warmer tone of voice.
Though the lyrics lack much in the way of substance, the melodies are genuinely catchy from start to finish. Rentz’s voice melds beautifully with the synthesised crescendo strings which are almost Britpop in nature bar the trippy quiver as they tail out. Rain and gloom are more Coventry than Clemente, CA, after all.
The one letdown on the track is the clichéd rap breakdown in the bridge, complete with autotuned nasties that temporarily suck the life out of the piece. A footnote in relation to the bigger picture, however; your average teenager doesn’t pump out tunes as imaginative and well-produced as this.
So hats off to Rentz. She manages to avoid indulging in pretence or overkill as young artists are prone to do while simultaneously embellishing true songwriting potential. ‘Superzoomy Space Ships’ belies a buzzing imagination and greater things psych-pop are in the cards for one Jaicee Rentz.
