I don't think you can do a quick-time punk identity deconstruction reel much more efficiently than this (as long as you're a dude from small town California, at least). The gender identity whiplash between "Rolling Balls" and "Highschool Football Hero" is so compelling that I can look past most of the lyrical shoehorning. Well shiiit, indeed.
A didactic deluge of prosaic prescriptions that could've used more levity, even though "the night dreamer's flu game" does have Hemlock Ernst talking about shitting his shorts by the time he gets to Phoenix. Listening to something like this after being tunechi'd to death for two hours at the gym feels really good, though.
Sheer hellish midrange torture. Jan Robbe lets you off easy at first. The first half of the album has a lot of slick syncopation that can be discerned if you grit your teeth through the distortion hard enough, and there are even some hints of light at the end of the tunnel. However, over the course of an entire album, simply ripping and tearing further and further in from the edges of a breakbeat becomes almost unbearable to listen to, to the point that even the doomsday aesthetics in ... read more
A goofy-ass sounding meme fusion of the sludgiest and least fun aspects of UK Bass and the driest material that came out on Ternesc. Somehow, the tracks manage to be both too short to develop much and sound like they're permanently stuck in second gear at the same time. Even though I don't keep up with this scene these days, I can't help but think that there are more successful takes on this sound out there, like the stuff on Timedance.
I have the same problem with Perturbator's music as I have with "Drive". Once you've managed to burrow into the center of the blazing and violent kaleidoscope of retrofuturist aesthetics on offer, everything suddenly feels stone cold. There is no respite. There are no humans to relate to. There is no reprieve from the sprawl. Your senses are saturated, but you're still starving. The roman statues decay and break open, only to turn up hollow on the inside.
OG cyberpunk ... read more
Bongers are really out here dropping whole-ass lovers rock albums in October. Come on. I'm on like 6 hours of daylight and falling around my neck of the woods as it is.
I keep mentioning this in reviews lately, but again: the problem with making unassuming, earnest and highly classicist albums like this in 2025 is that you'll be pounding your fists on a wall of post-irony, one that surrounds music as an artform. Songs like "Hello Operator" and "Holding On" may be ... read more
~30 minutes of death by arpeggio flamethrower in the style of Alek Szahala and Betwixt & Between, except with a much greater sense of urgency. The project could have used a bit more polish and atmosphere (the melodies do not provide enough momentum for the entire runtime). However, Type R makes up for this to a large extent with piles of rhythmic intensity and a staunch refusal to waste the listener's time. I appreciate that.
Sounds like an attempt by Jaki Liebezeit to make Bohren and der Club of Gore less sleep inducing. The groove hooks you in after a LONG while, but the boots these guys are wearing while playing on this album are so heavily worn by now. Cover art is a vibe and a half, though.
Ville Valo, aka love's favorite punching bag.
Growing up, while "Razorblade Romance" and the heartagram were everywhere, I never understood how someone, or something, could repeatedly slash at your psyche and jab you in the solar plexus as often as love has Valo, yet still compel you to come back and spill another gallon of blood and tears when the mic is back on. He feels so much, all the time. It spills over onto the screws of the alcohol- and nicotine-fueled, brain-cracking ... read more
Mansur decides to dial Vangelis up to 11 to create his main album environment, and it pays off in a big way. The reference points here are quite easy to spot (old timey prog rock heads will have a field day with this one, for instance). However, almost all of them are punched in so concisely and with such amazing timing that any syrupy nostalgia or melancholic excess doesn't get much time to bog the album down significantly. In the end, Mansur can even shred for several minutes over ... read more
After complaining about rap albums where rappers don't actually tell me anything about who they are for so long, I finally find one where someone actually does just that... and it's still not a winner. Ironically, the strict thematic cohesion for both lyrics and production seems to make this one less memorable over all. This is because that cohesion comes at the expense of standout hooks, significantly contrasting moods and the feeling of a rapper truly being vulnerable, not just a ... read more
Alright, I'm done touching grass for the summer. Time to brainstorm.
One of my main criticisms of drum 'n bass after the late 1990s is that, after the release of "Wormhole" by Ed Rush and Optical, the biohazard stamp from Virus Recordings simply won't come off. This comes in handy when you have an entire floodgate's worth of jazz samples and “intelligent” drum 'n bass dishwater to distance yourself from. However, what happens when, around two ... read more
The same joke, over and over, for about 40 minutes beneath fifteen samples and five jacked genre tropes per second. I can sympathize with the urge to yell about how all music sucks after dealing with particularly insufferable and stone faced fans of Northern Electronics for too long. However, if it really sucks THIS much, one would think it would cause Varg to consider a career change.
Thank you, based Detroit man. I will eat my techno veggies now. The elders are still the oldest.
Sigh. If only Norwegian BM bands could be as ferocious as this while offering a critique of Judeo-Christianity that's deeper than an ice cube tray. I get it: Nordic paganism and, subsequently, significant pieces of old Norse heritage, were effectively sword slashed out of existence. Now what? What's supposed to happen once all your rage fuel is burned off? Which metaphysical questions can you still answer? At least Deathspell Omega understood this and established their own dialectic. ... read more
Shocker: a fairly minimalistic and rhythmically off-kilter folktronica group winds up in the Eurovision Song Contest with their least offensive and challenging song yet. Actually surprising: the 3-minute runtime requirement in the ESC effectively lops off a lot of the fat and gristle from the other material on this EP, which doesn't sit quite as comfortably between the club and the charts as the group would probably like. Still, the issues are nothing that more reps in the studio ... read more
The problem with neo-classicist Detroit techno offerings, like this one, is summed up neatly by boomer techno cartoonists Bringmann & Kopetzki in one frame: https://www.threads.com/@bringmann_kopetzki_comics/post/DKjkc1oM12T
... not a techno boomer, you say? Alright: the implication is that artists like Louis Digital have too much reverence for foundational Detroit techno narratives, which the 1997 quote from Mark Davis in the album's press blurb is a perfect example of. To me, it ... read more
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Recent Review Comments
On AndrewK's review of American Football - American Football
"I'll have to check this. The fact that you and @doofy ended up on totally different ends on the rating scale, primarily due to the lyrics, makes me curious as to how much they will ultimately end up bothering me."
On Sakuzyo - Food And Musik -Japanese Food-
"@Lagrange Glad I could help! I'm not sure how representative this album is of his usual work, since it's so thoroughly a concept album. However, I do get the impression that a lot of the drama and compositional structure carries over either way."
On 𝗩𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮's review of Pitbull - Greatest Hits
"Haha, I mean, you're reviewing Pitbull. Subtlety is not really on the menu at that point. Same thing for "L'Amour Toujours", really, which is a whole can of worms on its own. I actually don't get the impression that the vocal performance for it was just another calculated pop move. The track just meshes too well with the other lesser-known stuff Gigi was doing at the time."
On Yung Exile - ISMOKEDANOUNCEINSPRINGFIELD
"Ah, nice! Looking forward to going even further down this rabbit hole, then."
On 𝗩𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮's review of Pitbull - Greatest Hits
"This reads a lot like my morbid fascination with the music of Gigi D'Agostino. A complete aesthetic shambles, yet so deliberate that it winds up appealing to a kernel of something personal, somewhere."
On Doofy's review of Everclear - So Much for the Afterglow
"I think I'm one of the few people on here that actually quite likes "El Distorto De Melodica", as I mainly associate it with old skating videos. Everclear were smart enough to not add vocals, as that would likely have turned the song into a RATM lite/nu metal disaster."
On Botched Invocation's review of Hieroglyphic Being - There Is No Acid In This House
"Saw him live just before COVID lockdowns kicked in globally. Can confirm that it hits. The question is just for how much longer, as HB's music springs out of pre-COVID club dynamics."
On Botched Invocation's review of Revenant Marquis - All The Pleasures Of Heaven
"In that case, it's a pretty good album title."
On 𝔹𝕦𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕝's review of Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura & Otomo Yoshihide - Good Morning Good Night
"@svse Is this album another random algorithm winner? I'm curious as to how this got so much attention on here, considering that it was released in 2004."
On AndrewK's review of Ansome - Knucklehead
"This more or less literally describes how Nasenbluten recorded "Steelworks Requiem". It sounds like a VERY lo-fi version of this EP."
On svse's review of 仮想夢プラザ [Virtual Dream Plaza] - 仮想夢プラザ [Virtual Dream Plaza]
"If your starting point for ambient music is that it should go somewhere, I think you're at odds with slushwave/vaporwave as a whole. The one-two punch of liminality and familiarity/deja vu is the key driver for the genre, and it only works non-sloppily as long as there is some retention of original retrofuturist critique. I'd argue that VDP is emblematic of the time when that gradually ceased to be the case, simply because the vibe became more important than the message."
On Botched Invocation's review of Boo Williams - The Best of Boo Williams
"Considering how vibe-based music is now, classic Chicago house would be due for another massive algorithmic resurgence, if it was actually concerned with keeping algorithmic pace. It is not, and so we get "Break My Soul" instead."
On Doofy's review of Old Saw - The Wringing Cloth
"Those track titles are tremendous. I hope the music lives up them when I take a listen later."
On homuli's review of Cosmos - Tears
"Looks like Erstwhile has it on Bandcamp, too: https://erstwhilerecords.bandcamp.com/album/tears"
On svse's review of TURQUOISEDEATH - Guardian
"@Gonam I'm not dismissing the album simply due to its focus on style. What's interesting to me is how people who come into drum 'n bass from different backgrounds wind up on either side of the dichotomy, and how this has moved the entire genre further down the highway to high definition (with the problems mentioned in this review being some of the side effects of that)."
On svse's review of TURQUOISEDEATH - Guardian
"@svse Alright then, I'll add that write-up to my list of projects. Need to record and edit some mixes for the summer first, but I'll try to gather some thoughts on this topic after that."
On svse's review of TURQUOISEDEATH - Guardian
"@dreamdesert I'd say the kind that places less focus on escapism and individual validation (not that I'm totally against just making some bangers, of course), and more on rhythmic experimentation and the subsequent exploration of adjacent cultural themes and narratives this gives room for. You can get there in a number of ways, like the Detroit-London connection on the "Naine Rouge EP" by Sinistarr, or "Radio Therapy Pt. 1" by Sci-Clone, which is another showcase for black jazz and improvisational tradition (Nathan Haines comes from a big jazz family). I'd put the guys in Machinecode up there, too. They're usually too concerned with pushing the envelope rhythmically to fall into the "cyberpunk aesthetic" trap."
On svse's review of TURQUOISEDEATH - Guardian
"Nice. I like a lot of these arguments, and you and some other people in the main review thread basically covered most of my thoughts on the album. There's a LOT to say about the 4K Ultra treatment that basically every creative current in drum 'n bass has gone through since the late 90s. In many ways, this album drags ambient and 4/4 jungle kicking and screaming out of the lounge and into the same style-over-substance dilemma. Maybe I should cover that more in detail with a review of my own after all."
On tha138's review of Hacienda - Sunday Afternoon
"Getting a <10 review almost seems better than getting this."
On Botched Invocation's review of Excision - X Rated
"I think Excision was around early enough to see what was going on with the likes of Dub Police and Flux Pavilion across the pond: basically a constant compression and saturation of space, until the pressure gets as intense and ultra-rigid (and ultra-unbearable, depending on who you ask) as it needs to be for the US festival circuit. Since space is finite, working like this kinda feels like a scorched earth approach. Where do you even go after the stadium dust clears?"
On svse's review of داریوش طلایی [Dariush Talai] - The Instrumental Radif of Persian Music: Radif of Mirza Abdollah
"Ah, yeah, I'm more willing to buy the argument that we aren't as in control of our tastes as we might think. The way you wrote it initially just felt like getting an entire bottle's worth of blackpills thrown in my face. I mean, why bother criticizing something that's just a vibe anyway?"
On svse's review of داریوش طلایی [Dariush Talai] - The Instrumental Radif of Persian Music: Radif of Mirza Abdollah
"If everyone is so boneheaded about music that aesthetic prescriptions are reduced to posturing, and if everyone's tastes are simply arbitrary, what's the point of writing reviews to begin with? Is everyone on AOTY just clout chasing?"
On helix's review of Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura & Otomo Yoshihide - Good Morning Good Night
"Reviews in haiku format? I'm here for it"
On svse's review of Cecil Taylor - The Cecil Taylor Unit
"Dude... You're 20 years old. No matter what shortcomings within the field of aesthetics you may have, I'd strongly encourage you to look at them as unexplored terrain and untapped philosophical potential, rather than a sin that you must atone for. It'll probably make a discussion around the gamification of music and how it skews our perspectives easier to navigate, for instance. Don't get lost in the sauce."
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