Well, it looks like my worries about an ethno-ambient crossover project like this were unfounded, as this album deftly hops over most pastiche "world music" and ambient wallpaper pitfalls. One of Pete Namlook's (R.I.P.) greatest strengths was the use of subtlety and tension. This enabled him to establish near-perfect push-pull-dynamics with his collaborators, most notably on the classic "Silence" with Dr. Atmo. That same dynamic works really well here. Over the course of the ... read more
Hushed, featherlight vocals that consistently have a sting in the tail, perfectly balanced use of space in the mix (look up Dan Carey/Mr. Dan if you're into house music), sparse instrumentation that somehow still is rich and rarely turns into sonic wallpaper... there's a lot of things being done right here. Somehow, "All Will Be Well" manages to be both the most stripped-down and the most climactic song on offer, maxing out multi-tracked vocals in order to score exceptionally high on ... read more
Submarine Man's gusto can't make up for some of the most flagrant abuse of autotune since "She's Mad".
"O, what poems I could have wrought!"
This album is an absolutely riveting life review in audio form. Over repeated listens, more and more fragments of lyrics and sound collage will coalesce for the listener. From there, everything repeatedly lurches from emotional zenith to trauma-induced nadir and back again, until the senses are frayed and dulled in the young man Doseone watches from without during the album's final moments. The sampledelic nature of the sounds beneath Doseone's ... read more
This one gets a lot of mileage out of a handful of sounds and carefully placed reverb (the tracks with P A T H S パス in particular utilize space and low pass filtering really well). It also creates a pretty effortless sense of liminality without resorting to the worst cliches of vaporwave and urban ambient melancholy. Unfortunately, the album's simplicity is also its greatest drawback. Over the course of 16 tracks, the album starts to feel undercooked, and the melodies become so simplistic ... read more
Man, this is rough. Ike Yard dissolved about a year after their first album, and frankly, it's hard not to sympathize a little with the befuddled A&Rs that listened to their music, scratching their heads while desperately trying to find something in it to sell. The material on this album feels like staring into a petri dish full of (proto-)industrial ideas and stodgy musique concrete, hunting for just a crumb of movement in one of the slowest musical osmoses ever recorded. The motion sick ... read more
~45 minutes of what sounds like early 90s Darkthrone that's stuck in molasses. Vi har sett det der før.
I can almost see the pulsations of the LEDs on Adam X's mixer while listening to this. The album mostly avoids the EBM nostalgia hole by excising all frills, leaving nothing but a bass drum bulldozer, slowly and punishingly morphing its way through a grayscale nightmare. Your speakers will not feel big enough.
Yeat is a high-level vibe merchant. The dystopian vortex blender of genres on the production side steers the album clear of the worst cyberpunk cliches (except from on the album cover, but that's easier to forgive for a rapper in his early 20s). I just wish said vortex blender would be used for a rapper with a bit more to say over the course of 22 tracks. A vibe can only sustain you for so long.
Rich, dense, throbbing and glitched-out syncopation fire. Some of the sound design on this album is so aurally stimulating that you can almost feel your auditory cortex lighting up (if your brain is sensitive to the Ganzfeld effect, this might get even more intense). Supire deliberately works with a fairly restricted sound palette, making it harder to maintain the intensity of the album's push-pull dynamic between distortion and ambience throughout (the opening track, in particular, is a bit of ... read more
A perfectly competent but ultimately unexciting plod through another dad house dominion. There just isn't a lot on offer here that hasn't been explored already by other artists in the past three or four decades. This applies even when the mixtape slows down and starts veering off into balearic territory (something Mark Barrott tackled with far greater success on "Sketches From An Island").
A claustrophobia-inducing dredge through the decaying hull of early dubstep, slowly and methodically snuffing out all glimmers of light. Add 7 to the rating if you never went to DMZ. Subtract 7 from the rating if your headphones/speakers are cheap.
~170 BPM! Chainsaw dubstep basslines! Hardcore kickdrums! Double time flows! Future core! The first half of "Circus" is a J-pop banger machinery firing on all cylinders. All the flash and pilfered ideas from the DTM scene almost make you forget that you're listening to an album by a boy band. Unfortunately, the second half of the album brings you crashing back down to Earth, thanks to a series of sickly sweet ballads/sweetboy anthems and processed vocals that make all your teeth fall ... read more
I've got somewhat of a soft spot for this. The goofy and somewhat self-aware music video makes the pretty awful lyrics more tolerable. However, you're still stuck firmly in assembly line pop purgatory here. I could maybe be talked into singing Ty Dolla Sign's verse at karaoke if it's late enough, though.
Opening with the 10-minute, grungy and ultra-minimal "Black Angel" followed by another 10 minutes of Wolfgang Voigt style loop churn makes for quite the casual filter for your album. Once you make it to the other side of the two "angels", however, the album unfolds into a huge sprawl. Hallucinator then proceeds to beam dub techno to the outermost edges of a concrete jungle, rarely straying into meandering territory.
This is still a very rewarding listen, one that wouldn't ... read more
![冥丁 [Meitei] - 古風 III [Kofū III]](https://cdn2.albumoftheyear.org/100x0/album/770398-kofu-iii_0710.jpg)
Meitei refuses to descend the hauntological doom spiral, despite overwhelming pressure from Japanese history and lingering social ills. The dusty tape legacy of Ghost Box and lo-fi is present on Kofū III, but the sense of closure and reconciliation with a Japanese future that never came to pass feels different. Once this is the case, maybe you actually can close your album with a track called "廣島" and evoke a sense of optimism, even if it is very small.
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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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