“Fleeting and Forever” is a new song by The August Arrival, a Canadian music outlet operated by singer-songwriter Sara MacDonald, with the help of friends and fellow musicians. It’s a second track from “Hillsides,” her outstanding debut full-length album released on October 11th that you should immediately check out if you’re into cleverly assembled and flawlessly performed music. The song explores themes of challenge, impermanence, and acceptance, serving as a healing process as it gave voice to her feelings when she was shaping her life. In “Fleeting and Forever,” MacDonald combines many different but complementary music subgenres, shaping a mesmerizing ambiance that will appeal to even the pickiest music enthusiasts. Perhaps indie rock comes to mind first, but you’ll immediately notice how some of the finest properties borrowed from indie pop, indie folk, alt-pop, and soft rock found their way into this sonic equation. She uses all these elements as more than necessary enhancements, accentuations, decorations, and other details to uplift her song to new heights while remaining solely loyal to the primary sonic direction. Therefore, these experimentations with many different but complementary music genres resulted in a catchy, engaging, memorable, composition that will appeal to all true indie music fans.
As soon as you press play, you’ll notice that The August Arrival invested heart and soul into this track. Each vocal, sonic, and rhythmic maneuver has its place and purpose, shaping a calm, soothing, relaxing, ethereal ambiance that instantly grabs you by the collar and refuses to let go long after the song ends. The song arrives with a perfect structure, adorned with many intricate segments, brilliant ideas, and outstanding instrumentations, vividly demonstrating Sara MacDonald’s dedication to the craft. You’ll immediately hear how her passionate, sincere, confident, powerful vocal performance commands attention and guides the listening apparatus through each segment, perfectly decorating everything she tried to achieve with this track. The impressive vocal range seamlessly balances low, mid, and high notes, emphasizing all the orchestrations. In the meantime, the interplay between guitars and synths plays a significant role in shaping a beautiful sonic backdrop for all the vocal maneuvers to shine upon. There are jangly, reverby, tastefully assembled chord progressions resonating on one side while the synth themes, melodies, harmonies, and other sonic maneuvers shine on the other. All these instrumentations perfectly match Macdonald’s impressive vocal performance.
“Fleeting and Forever” wouldn’t sound this good without an equally impressive rhythm section. You’ll hear how intricate, audible, warm-sounding basslines lurk beneath the mentioned orchestrations, providing more than necessary heftiness, clearness, and deepness while binding everything together with drums. The bass guitar immensely supports guitars by adding punchy, heavy, powerful notes that perfectly match jangly chord progressions. In the meantime, the excellent drumming performance based upon cleverly arranged, flawlessly performed, well-accentuated, groovy beats, breaks, fills, and other percussive acrobatics keeps the remainder of the instrumentations while dictating groove and pace. If the guitars and keys act as a backdrop for all the vocals to shine upon then the rhythm section serves as a backdrop, holding everything together like glue. Sara MacDonald’s The August Arrival sounds divine from scratch to finish. She and her friends invested nothing but outstanding ideas and impressive musicianship while writing, composing, arranging, and producing this song. “Fleeting and Forever” exemplifies what you might expect from her debut full-length release, entirely packed with marvelous, soulful, memorable tunes. With this composition, Sara MacDonald showcases all her abilities, talent, skills, knowledge, and experience, and positions herself high on the contemporary indie/singer-songwriter music scene. The single is available on all streaming platforms. Don’t miss it!
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