If harmony is the cornerstone of every impactful pop performance, saying that the debut single and music video from Dom Cotton in “Get Me Outta Here” is a hit waiting to pop off online might not be doing it justice. The first element that really smacks us in this track is the vocal harmony, wrapping around the hook like the instrumentation and Cotton himself are as much the same as they are individual entities. The magic between leading man and the lush musical backdrop is endless in “Get Me Outta Here,” to such an extent, I might add, that I was surprised this was his virgin major release upon hearing it the first time.
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/domcotton1/?hl=en
The lyrics in this song constantly touch on a desire to be free, to get out, the break away from the suffocation of the sublimely predictable, to the point of embodying a little bit of the anxious delivery we get from Cotton around the 2:30 mark. There’s a lot of angst in the refrain, but it’s entirely necessary to stress the point – after all, I think it’s obvious that we’re dealing with a singer/songwriter here who doesn’t want to beat around the bush but give us everything he has straight.
This vocal precision is something that I wish I heard from every greenhorn who drops a record or a single these days, and I have a feeling that if it gets any tighter than it already is for this performance that it’s going to be difficult to keep the mainstream press from sniffing around Cotton’s discography. Again, he’s only got the one song in his complete catalog at the moment, but in time I can see the approach he’s taken for this specific performance working for him with a variety of different tempos and tonal foundations than what we find in “Get Me Outta Here.”
The melodic backdrop is completely natural in this single, and I had a hard time locating any element in the song that I thought would qualify as plasticized or lacking soul in comparison to what you might hear on the FM dial contemporarily. There’s really nothing unfeeling or unreal about “Get Me Outta Here;” Dom Cotton is being everything the smart pop singers of 2021 have to be to break through to the primetime while also exhibiting a lot of raw emotionality some of his peers are just too guarded about to really exploit.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/get-me-outta-here/1550242974?i=1550242977
I love the look of this first studio work from Dom Cotton, and if he keeps his nose to the grindstone I think he’s going to find himself quite the successful following as 2021 marches toward 2022. With or without the effects of a pandemic on live music, Cotton is bringing us the intensity of a live performance in “Get Me Outta Here” that I didn’t know anyone without a huge background could pull off until now. He’s going to be interesting to follow, and I think I speak for most of the critics around the underground when I say as much.
Chadwick Easton