The sound of clutching your memories too tightly, which very often doesn't pan out all that well for an artist. The beach just isn't THAT nice of a place, even (or especially, depending on your mileage) in Florida.
Just love this guy's work. I'm not sure how Frej Levin does it, but somehow, he always places the right elements in the right spots at the exact right time for maximum impact. Tracks like "Kyo" simply transcend the trad house blueprint upon which Frej models his output, a blueprint that is basically ancient history by now. I don't think I'll need anything else than this and some old timey stuff on Svek for this summer, thank you very much.
Sounds like Cez got sick of the daytime radio/Spellemann money. The result is a return to zero, in other words, talking shit on mic for about an hour. I'm half tempted to call this the first noteworthy Norwegian rage album, but the throwback references on the production side, the pop filter rattling enunciation in the delivery and the thematic cohesion probably disqualify it from that classification. The album nevertheless leans heavily on rage for momentum: the lyrics gradually lose ... read more
Dammit, you're not supposed to make me laugh this hard in public at out-of-context ragga samples.
Once you get over the initial shock of the ear-splittingly loud skewering of every single brostep trope in existence, it's worth nothing that this mixtape somehow implodes the compressed hellscape the genre has turned into. It does this with ridiculously precise sound design, to the point that the spaces between the syncopation patterns consistently offset and balance out the pressure ... read more
Damn. It's sad to report that I don't think even Steve von Till, who I have nothing but respect for, can sell me on this particular end of the darker Americana/folk intersections.
Full bias disclosure: Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan, Leonard Cohen and (partially) Tom Waits, all clear reference points for this album, represent major sources of inspiration for a particularly morose and self-involved brand of Norwegian singer-songwriter melancholia. I was overexposed to it during my formative ... read more
Oh no, another jazz pleb reviewing free jazz on AOTY. Well, guys like Paal Nilsen-Love and Peter Brötzmann seem to play around my neck of the woods constantly, and I'm starting to feel like I'm missing out. So, I thought I'd at least take a more descriptive crack at evaluating the stuff, and then we'll see how things turn out.
"Tokuzo" opens with "Colour Flames", which is basically 10 minutes of Coltrane-maxxing on sax, frantically trying to keep up ... read more
![灰野敬二 [Keiji Haino] - ここ [Koko]](https://cdn2.albumoftheyear.org/100x0/album/170806--koko-1.jpg)
Well, this was not necessarily someone I'd put on my shortlist of people who'll give Laraaji a run for his money. What seemingly starts as a bit of rummaging around the fret board for chords eventually blooms into half an hour of pure pastoral joy. It also solidly backs up Keiji's "something from nothing" M.O, even though he is not aurally shredding the listener to pieces this time.
After 30 years in the game, the walls seem to be closing in on Surgeon's definition of techno. The press writings for this album indicate that he not only is feeling increasingly disconnected from techno's brand-centered evolution. He also seemingly has no other response to said development than old faithful: a live jam/studio hybrid that squeezes the absolute maximum out of a handful of loops through the manipulation of the space and time they exist in. There is no synthesis or ... read more
Loud and bulky post-rock that swings HARD for the fences. Unfortunately, the album fails to connect with its biggest punches. There are too many cracks in the foundation: everyone is playing painfully simple melodies, the melodrama is ratcheted up too quickly for the crescendos to be all that rewarding, the social commentary is about 10 years behind the curve, and the punched-in/glitched tech dystopia messaging comes across as far too heavy-handed and cartoonishly villainous compared to how ... read more
"I am not gang gang."
- 50 Cent
Boldy flash floods the end zone with quotables and grit on this album (like the about three dozen west coast references that make up the skeleton for "Bag it Up"). However, as the beats become more and more washed-out and hazy, it also gets much harder to see through the fog of samples and boasty lyrics about gang activity to focus on the actual person on the mic. The cinematic title track that caps off the album remedies this somewhat ... read more
Kilbourne reduces NYC hardcore down to its barest essentials for a hardtechno-dominant landscape. It's refreshing to hear hardcore that isn't furiously sprinting past all narrative widgets again. However, if the hardtechno/hardcore border is what interests you, "Downtempo" by Mad Dog is still a more ambitious offering than this.
Oh man, this was not a good idea. About ten years down the line, LGoony is clearly caught between a rock and a hard place: his cloud rap origins make him too boasty for mainstream German pop, but his sensitive demeanor and slight stature make him too "soft" for a notoriously aggro German rap scene (something he has more or less admitted himself in interviews during the promo phase for this album). "Piano Forever" seemed to hint at his first few steps on the way out of the ... read more
I'm actually amazed at how well this collection of pre-concrête compositions has held up, and that's before taking into account the techniques and atmospheres on this record that can be found in, well, basically everything ambient you've ever liked in pop culture for the last few decades. "Wire Recorder Piece" was recorded in 1944(!), many years before Pierre Schaeffer would codify musique concrête theory for future generations. Despite this, ... read more
J-core artists have more or less been permanently content-brained since the genre's inception, almost wholly reliant as it is on adjacent pop cultural energy (anime, rhythm games, fan conventions). However, it still baffles me how so many can absolutely thrive within the time constraints this leads to, where other hardcore artists would probably turn into caricatures and fly straight into a scorching EDM sun. By all accounts, this project should have been a loosely gathered, harshly ... read more
The ballads aren't really my speed, trainspotters could probably spend hours picking out old school soul/funk references, sample origins and break names, the lyrics are so simple it's almost to a fault... but it just doesn't matter all that much. There's just too much talent involved to protest too much: Raphael Saadiq steers even the new jack swingiest songs away from OTT macho clichés (even when sampling "The Wrong N**ga To Fuck Wit", of all things), Ali ... read more
Even when I deliberately seek out blatantly memey music, I seem to wind up with releases that are only memey on the surface. This album/mixtape is no exception, either. As it turns out, beneath the ridiculous bars ("I'm a cash cow drinking Mezcal / Way in Moscow / Imma valet park the Tahoe out in Costco / Had to cop a crossbow"), outlandish antics and grand sweeping brush strokes with neon paint, Riff Raff basically keeps his feet planted firmly on foundational southern hip hop ... 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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