False Negative

In 2021, we swim in a musical cesspool of canned production -- beats get passed around from artist to artist, altered just enough to avoid a copyright penalty. And then every once in a while something different hits the water and we all perk up -- something evoking a bygone era, or swinging hard out of left field in a way that hasn't been heard before.Love & Rose's latest electro/hip hop/jazz/lo-fi EP,"False Negative" is one such example that does both -- a quintessentially Taiwanese bilingual English/Mandarin extended play that sums up two years of musical and personal soul-searching by vocal/producer duo Christine Chien and Rose Liang."False Negative" is clearly a reference to that viral infection that has dogged the world for the last year and a half, but also to the idea that fear--of something calamitous, might be simply enough to keep us ducking heads into the sand, avoiding the truth of the modern condition -- that perhaps we don't even know how to come to true happiness anymore."False Negative" is itself written as a search for the silver lining among hurt, loss, and the all-around shitty times that comprises 2020. It's written for quarantine, while in quarantine, by the quarantined -an ode to finding happiness in the bitterness of loss, and finding positive energy in the time of COVID; the quarantine extended play that we deserve.