What You Waiting For?
Procrastination has a respectable vocabulary: preparation, timing, keeping your options open. You can spend years sounding remarkably sensible while avoiding the thing you actually want to do. Bristol’s splitxlip poke at that habit on ‘What You Waiting For?’, with frontwoman Bailey Blair bringing the authority of someone who has caught herself doing it. Her subject is the gap between imagining a life and getting round to living it, a painfully familiar place when your phone offers an endless feed of people apparently making better use of their twenties, thirties or Tuesday afternoon. What gives the premise warmth is Blair’s willingness to implicate herself. Anxiety, overthinking and feeling behind are part of the conversation, and she leaves room to laugh at the ridiculous situations they can produce. Recognition can be energising: suddenly your private little failure has company. Blair has also given herself a fairly persuasive answer to the title’s question. Tired of struggling to communicate how she wanted her songs realised, she learnt to produce them herself. She approached the video with similar appetite, taking on directing, shooting and editing with a phone, a field and the willingness to look a bit daft while figuring it out. The sight of her running makes a neat physical joke out of trying to catch up with your own expectations. It also gives the project a scrappy, inviting spirit: experience is something you acquire by starting. Of course, money, work and exhaustion put real limits on what anyone can do, and a pep talk cannot wish those away. Still, splitxlip make an appealing case for having a go before you feel fully qualified. There is pleasure in watching someone trade the safety of knowing what they are doing for the possibility of finding out.