Cody Fry - "The End"
The modern rebirth of Orchestral Pop is finally here
Look, I can’t lie: I’ve been on the Cody Fry hype train for a couple of years now. He was a new find for me in 2021, and Pictures of Mountains made it onto my Top 40 for the year - in 40th. Sometime shortly after that album came out, the closing track for 2017’s Flying took off on TikTok, and Fry latched onto its sudden success by following it up with a cover of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and “Underground” in 2022.
In January, this year, Fry dropped a compilation album with those two songs and a few other tracks which had been reworked into this Orchestral style, and it was a beautiful listen.
But it wasn’t a fresh album.
The End, with eight of its nine songs being new and original offerings, is.
Now, none of this is meant to totally disregard the fact that pop songs utilizing orchestral instruments isn’t a new phenomenon. Orchestral Pop-influenced songs still pop (hah) up from time-to-time, but the genre has only had one dedicated artist in the last three decades: The Last Shadow Puppets, a supergroup featuring the frontman of the Arctic Monkeys and Miles Kane.
Aside from that one group and a handful of “Ork-Pop” acts in the 90s, the largest presence that Orchestral Pop has had this century is through its descendants, Baroque Pop (Lana Del Rey, Kate Bush, Fiona Apple), Chamber Pop (two Taylor Swift albums, plus a handful of smaller artists such as Mlady), and the Shibuya-kei movement in Japan.
Cody Fry’s recent evolution, though, falls directly into the heart of Orchestral Pop and has the potential to fully reinvigorate it for modern listeners. And as a person who loves deep instrumentation, I’m all for this. Because Baroque Pop is definitely not about deep instrumentation.
All of this is to say that I’ve been waiting with bated breath for this album’s arrival. And I wasn’t disappointed.
The orchestral elements bring all of the depth I was hoping for and more. It isn’t just the occasional bit of string, either, or bringing the piano forward. Woodwinds feature prominently, and all of those little production decisions are suddenly purely organic, meaning there aren’t missed opportunities or boring sections. There’s always something else going on, which means every song utilizes strong harmonic elements and builds an atmosphere. Even the weaker songs on The End are inherently more interesting to my ear than the vast majority of minimalist music out there.
And there are three tracks here which fall below the rest of the album; that is to say, there are three good tracks: “Waltz For Sweatpants”, the not-quite-two-minute-long “Fine”, and “You’re Gonna Be Okay”, which features a full choir. These three are tracks I would consider average. There’s also the cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You”, which is a pretty faithful recreation (except it feels bigger with the orchestration), but it’s an above-average cover. The other five original tracks are songs that I would consider to be standouts on most albums.
On one hand, those three tracks feel lackluster - on the other, they really feel lackluster in comparison to the rest of the album, because I like them well enough when they’re playing. The other major negative consideration for the album is its relative brevity, at only 32 minutes long, which does make me feel that those three tracks could have been polished a bit more.
Structurally, The End is a concept album with a solid arc,1 following a relationship from its inception in opener and title track “The End”, to its sudden demise at “Things You Said”, which is a gorgeous duet with Abby Cates (who does not yet have an album of her own out). “Fine” and “You’re Gonna Be Okay” close out the original material on the album with a shift to the pain and healing after the relationship is over.
Fry also uses recurring imagery in flying and travelling as illustrative elements:
In “What If”, the speaker reiterates “What if I fly?”, as opposed to falling and getting hurt in this new relationship;
“Traveling Alone” focuses in on the agony of separation because, when you’re traveling by yourself when in a relationship, you’d really prefer to have the other person with you;
“You’re Gonna Be Okay” opens with the speaker talking about crying on the floor of an airport bathroom, turning the album’s earlier brightness on its head.
All told, the album is solid, and most of the songs are absolutely some of the best songs, especially pop songs of the year.
Rating: Blue
I have to give my wife credit here - she spotted the arc before I did. Clever minx.
♡♡♡