BMA single review by Vince Leigh
Kaiwyn’s second single, You’re My Kind, received some healthy attention early this year when it scored the No. 1 position on Pulse FM Hawkesbury Radio’s Discovery Program.
His follow-up, curiously titled The Cut After The First, is a bright and instantly accessible pop track whose lyric focuses on the perils of attraction when the object of that focus is entangled with another.
Complication results from this real or imagined plight, but Kaiwyn’s accompanying musical story is not so and does a good job of fusing such a fraught narrative with appealing, smooth and self-assured applications of sound and performance.
Kaiwyn’s background is as intriguing as his polished pop blend and centres on a meeting of music and medicine. After finishing medical school, he finds himself in Tamworth, NSW, for his internship and residency. There he participated in the 2015 Tamworth Busking Competitions and, no doubt experienced the addictive thrill of live performance.
Despite this, however, his commitment to healthcare remained and now the emerging artist attempts to balance the two disciplines. And this dedication is evidenced by his comment detailing the origin of his inspiration, as he has stated, ‘My work in healthcare, especially in psychiatry, feels like a double edge sword for me, learning and understanding human emotions and actions to a certain degree with references to abundant of varying psychoanalysts’ theories of mind.’
The Cut After The First convincingly merges a pop-rock dynamism with an amiable intimacy, making the most of pleasing chord progressions and associated sweet notes to drive home the lyric’s rather heart-breaking discovery, as this snippet reveals: ‘Why have you re-opened my wounds? / When I thought that you cared for me’.
Perhaps what is most effective about this track is this sad meets uplifting confluence; the song sounds almost celebratory, yet we are invited to joyfully experience the dire predicament our storyteller has revealed for us, a revelation which is more like a confession—an element which only makes the song even more appealing.
The Cut After The First is out on May 5th. Have a listen via Spotify and Apple Music
