A watery and garbled mess. Excelsior operates within a highly condensed and immediate framework. However, the ideas inside of it sound too slow, disjointed and sketch-like to make efficient use of the album's "audio short story" format, a format I'm usually a big fan of (Cornelius and Wechsel Garland come to mind as examples). "No! (Geiger Dub)" even manages to make the Sleng Teng Riddim sound boring, which is a feat in and of itself. Still, I'm curious to hear a Malone ... read more
Ebbs and flows almost flawlessly, and with a range of immersive sounds and effects that I find very hard to resist emotionally. The main reason this wasn't rated higher is that it treads on pretty familiar sonic territory, especially for people dialed into the 2010-era drone scene (Bobby Krlic/The Haxan Cloak and the soundtrack to Returnal is a good recent example of this). Dock another twelve points from the score if synths in your drone diet give you digestive issues, but man, that has to ... read more
Jazz-induced cyberpsychosis. Add another 8 to the rating if you're unfamiliar with the work of Jeff Mills.
Feels more like a pre-M3 convention singles compilation than an album. Kobaryo's blueprint (total genre frenzy within an ultra-compressed hardcore time frame) gets increasingly repetitive over 15 tracks, despite the album's consistent theme. However, the sheer aural impact is still undeniable. It also helps that Kobaryo is happy to stretch a blueprint almost to its breaking point with a track like Singularity at 2.64e+6 BPM.
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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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