I went to one of ol' Billy Bas' shows in Oslo around the time this came out. After depressing the audience with dying tape reels and erratic, jerky shadows on the walls for an hour, he grabbed the mic and started ranting about losing his baggage at the airport. Then he just put this on and abruptly walked off stage. The similarity to Vangelis is undeniable, but somehow, the piece still feels like a logical next step from the symbolic death of the American dream in The Disintegration ... read more
Tunng circles back to songs about love. More accurately: the boring, pragmatic kind of love, love that is constantly being taken for granted, until it suddenly vanishes, sending unsuspecting humans crashing through the floors below. Like Tunng's early albums, I have the same issue with thoroughly pedestrian pacing and vocal delivery on this one as well. However, Mike Lindsay again steers the album away from death by twee due to his sense of the uncanny. The sounds used blur and become ... read more
Slim pickings. Apart from Dustvoxx (who has worked within self-imposed time frame compression in hi-tech for a while) and RoughSketch (who has been shitposting his way through J-core for years), everyone sounds like they're scrambling desperately to get their shit in. The end result is massively clipped versions of previous hits or derivative versions of their European role models in hardcore. Stop feeding me scraps from the table, guys.
Finally! I've struck out majorly with every new techno release that I've discovered via AOTY so far, but this one finally breaks the L streak. I'm personally not all that bothered with the recent resurgence of heavily percussion-driven techno (aka "hardgroove"). Techno as a whole crashed out after overdosing on cut-and-paste loops sometime after 2000, and now, pockets of it are recoiling back to old stomping grounds, fleeing in horror from Berlin and TikTok's chart ... read more
*points frantically at the About section in the profile*
Much like last year's excellent "Talitakum" by Avalanche Kaito, it's fairly straight forward to grasp this album's central nerve after reading some background info in the press materials. Rile up a squall of percussion traditionally used for tribal Sufi rituals, set it on a collision course with western industrial and post-punk fervor, and then try to harness the storm by installing a human vocal trance nexus in ... read more
An almost painfully compressed, flattened and rocket-fueled genre run in the loudness race. The symphonic hard techno offerings at the end have a bit more meat on the bone. However, they still rely heavily on rehashed ideas from the rhythm game hit "Infinite Strife", which is several years old by now. All three DTM wizzes involved here are capable of more than this, I reckon.
I don't think I can fairly rate an album that is inspired by source material that's so thoroughly above my pay grade (like selected ghazals from the Divan of Hafez). That said, the first half made me worried that Kang and Kenney would retread a lot of ground from earlier works ("Eclipse" is a return to the minimalistic voice/viola dual tracking unit employed on previous albums like "Aestuarium"). Luckily, there is still a solid chunk of variation on offer. For one, ... read more
Around 25 minutes of what sounds like a theater kid bugging on Jean-Michel Jarre. Meh. Thumbs up for a tight and cohesive narrative within a short and unforgiving time frame. Thumbs down for an overall lack of grit (limp amen breaks and melodies that can't quite reach the Zimmer/Walfisch scope the material seems to be aiming for).
Naked Music, eh? I did not expect to see that name pop up here, as I mostly associate it with deep house oldheads. In 2004, they were already lamenting the label's new direction, as it gradually shifted away from its house origins towards seemingly more lucrative downtempo and lounge pop territory. The later Blue Six albums are good examples of this, as is, to a lesser extent, this album right here. The musical handiwork is not really at fault for this, as Gaelle's voice surfs ... read more
Hearing "28 shots, side of the car" again, over an almost vaporized beat by James Blake, of all people, was not on my bingo card for 2024.
Quick flashback: I was at university in a small student town just outside London for a short time back when Rinse FM still had pirate status. Between rave bars, relentless beef and a constant push for mainstream metamorphosis, I noticed that grime always seemed to find room for oddball MCs, such as Flirta D (with fucked up mouth noises), ... read more
![柏大輔 [Daisuke Kashiwa] - Ice](https://cdn2.albumoftheyear.org/100x0/album/993683-ice_040709.jpg)
At this point, I'm actually grateful that people still dedicate whole concept albums to simply writing melodies until the cows come home. It seems like such a simple idea in theory. However, in practice, the chance of making an impact with a classicist approach like this dwindles in tandem with the loss of music's value to more immediate forms of art. How do you re-contextualize a 21-minute post-rock epic like "EBV" for an audience with thoroughly saturated attentional ... read more
![Polish Hex - [untitled]](https://cdn2.albumoftheyear.org/100x0/album/906593-untitled_003514.jpg)
This was a pleasant surprise. The tape gives you a scuffed yet massive 40-minute drone golem, slowly lurching out of the shadows between Eliane Radigue and Current 93 before proceeding to crush everything in its path. The visceral and distorted payoff around the 30 minute mark is definitely worth the wait.
Argh, not like this! Yes, this album eliminates the majority of the structural inconsistencies from the previous album, "Memoria". However, the means by which it does so are overdosing on pseudo-baroque melodramium and overcooking the hell out of the tracks on offer. Over the years, J-core artists have been given shorter and shorter timeframes to operate within by their own industry. This time around, Laur unfortunately sounds like he's fighting desperately to contain his ... read more
Rage: where the hip hop album goes to die.
Considering how much of a niche-within-a-niche subgenre it has become on this side of Die Lit/Whole Lotta Red, it seems almost inevitable that rage in longplay format will spin its wheels against its self-imposed concrete wall of restrictions (ultra-short time frames, garbled lyrics that punch through the mix in bits and pieces, synth preset hell). Overcoming all of these challenges over the course of nearly 20 tracks requires almost a miracle, and ... read more
Oh boy, time to crack open the can of old timey Chicago house worms.
As I've mentioned previously, I'm a Y2K era progressive trance apologist. This was a bit awkward in a Norwegian club scene that was bifurcated into a) nerd worship of sub 120 BPM Detroit and Chicago material and b) an unabashed euro trance mega rave frenzy. Spencer Kincey aka Gemini was one of those artists that the former camp would religiously bible thump the latter with. This would, unfortunately, somewhat put ... read more
Warp speed pop hardcore goofing at around five vocal samples per second. This could've been an unbridled gimmicky disaster, but luckily, t+pazolite's sense of tension and release reins in the circus antics just enough. Dock 15 from the rating if your hardcore absolutely has to clobber you in the face with kickdrums.
Sounds like somebody ate Mark Fell and went on a Soundcloud beatmaker rampage afterwards. The tracks on offer are a bit too short for their own good, and the beats are syncopated like a DJ's nightmare ("Experimental club music"? More like "insulting the dancefloor"). However, things stay mostly on the right side of erratic and annoying. Considering how thin and navel gazing the deconstructed club music schtick can be, I'm willing to cut something with as much bite ... read more
This EP feels like a swan dive into 80s pastiche hell on the surface. However, t e l e p a t h picks up the baton after Oneohtrix Point Never and deftly scalpels off harmonic cliches, grandiosity and sappy, neon-lit synth excess. The result is a surprisingly precise and effective set of emotive loops, zeroing in on and keeping a sharp focus on the emotional core at the intersection of new age, ambient and synth pop. Sadly, this kind of successful formula, when left in the hands of people who ... read more
Create an account to rate and review albums.
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."
Advertisement