In her music video for the song “Goliath,” Chaz Kiss isn’t looking to waste our time with a lot of props or fanfare alluding to her presence in the alternative rock hierarchy. She wants us to immerse ourselves in the energy of the music, and through a little raw color and primed rhythm, Chaz Kiss makes it relatively impossible to escape the clutches of the riffing in this track, which couples with her vocal to create one of the more jarring – and menacing – rock listens I’ve come across from an artist on either side of the dial in the past few months.
Our singer’s voice isn’t well integrated in this mix but instead made to straddle the guitar parts as it would in a live performance. This DIY layering, as it would be, doesn’t suggest amateurishness on the part of the production quality, but instead shows us that Chaz Kiss is someone who appreciates the old school punk rock aesthetic that brought forth everything from the hardcore movement in the 1980s to grunge a decade later, and freewave content two decades after that. This is an homage in some ways, but it’s got both feet planted in the here and now.
Compositionally speaking, I don’t know that you can get around the minimalist cues in “Goliath” without addressing how efficient Chaz Kiss can be when she’s trying to come up with a smart hook, and it’s a quality that I can see a lot of different critics going nuts for this spring. She knows how to be cut and dry without sacrificing her inventiveness as a melodic singer and songwriter, which is a lot harder than it might sound. Balance is everything in the pop genre, and this is one rocker who knows how to make it work to her advantage all the more.
I just found out about Chaz Kiss this past March, but I’m digging the element that she’s extolling with the release of “Goliath” this month. Her virtues are tethered to a puritan variety of punkishness that I’ve come to lament and mourn over the past five years as an increasingly plasticized identity has replaced the grassroots sound that I grew up with, and as long as she sticks to this present artistic trajectory, I think Chaz Kiss can play a real role in resurrecting this style of music from its premature (and at times overly exaggerated) grave.
