Ears Wide Open: Coach & Ref

Kevin Bronson on November 27th, 2018

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Sports coaches and referees have notoriously adversarial relationships, but that’s doesn’t seem to be the case with Coach & Ref. The new pop duo is the alliance of veteran songwriters Bleu McAuley and Ryan Perez-Daple, who share a studio. Bleu has written for a host of A-list pop artists, worked as a producer and released seven solo albums. Perez-Daple has composed for film and television, among his other credits.

The duo has caught a bug that’s been going around among a lot of studio musicians — a fetish for the sounds of analog synths, along with the desire to somehow transcend the squishy nostalgia that drenches music made with vintage instruments. The singles “Decisions” and “3-D” are the first from an album Coach & Ref have prepped for 2019.

The latter features the the candied vocals of Brooke Tomlinson over red-alert beats and a big drop. Pop-soul man Mike Taylor sings on “Decisions,” swooping in gaily from left field on synths unlocked from some ’80s vault. “‘Decisions’ is a song that answers a question people ask me all the time, ‘Why are you so damn happy?’” Taylor explains. “he answer for me is, ‘I choose to be so damn happy.’ It’s as simple as that. Of course, no human can be in a great mood all the time, but I think happiness is more than an emotion, I think it’s something deeper than that. I choose to go through life focusing on the positive. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it forces me to identify and articulate internally what happiness is and if it’s even possible for me to achieve it. Once I was able to define what happiness was for me it made it so much easier to love others and to be loved by others. So when I say ‘I made the decision to be happy …’ what I am really saying is that I decided to go on a quest to find it.”

Coach & Ref, who perform wearing light-reflective coats with a full visuals show, make their live debut this week, opening for Taylor at the Roxy.

||| Stream: “Decisions” and “3-D”