by Karl Magi

Rogue VHS & Beachdolls’s “Disappear” reflects on how people choose to remember relationships. The song starts with twinkling notes descending in a soft wash. In the distance, gently lustrous tones float as Jessica Ess’s bittersweet voice carries a lightly touching melody. Synth cascades around it with an opalescent sheen as Jessica Ess reaches out with burning expression while the gargantuan rhythm heaves.

The main melody is full of heartbroken pain while the notes around it gleam with silky light, and Jessica Ess grasps me with her evocative performance, her voice echoing with conviction. The notes that move past give off moonlight as the vocals flow through the music with plaintive strength.

The underlayer is heavy and full of great propulsion while the delicate vocals drift through the music with loss and emptiness. The song ends on Jessica Ess’s sincere expression of and a glimmering synth.

The narrator says that soon she’ll be a memory, someone you write about in a song. She adds, “Soon I’ll be a melody,” a flashback about how the other person was wrong. She could be the monster or the villain, “in the game for you to try and break in and rescue me from the flames.”

As our storyteller asks the other person to “call her a disaster,” she wonders if she’s everything they feared. She continues, “Tell them that it’s my fault, put it all on me.” She points out that the song’s subject will never tell their friends because “you were never here.” She adds, “You can blame it on my heart as you disappear.”

“I can leave it all behind, like your average movie screen,” she says, while the other person struggles with wondering why she wouldn’t stay. She explains, “Ready for rebirth, I know we were never in the scene,” and though the other person promised they would change for her, “that’s a losing game.”

In conclusion, our storyteller says, “We both know how it goes when strangers become lovers and back to strangers again. I’m okay with burning bridges, I don’t want to be friends.”