Persona_Yellow

probably the most relistenable quadeca project for its sheer variety of ideas and genres. there's a really interesting tension between the lo-fi qualities of the music and the grandness in quadeca's compositional style; probably no better example of this than the song EASIER, where the intimacy of the vocals submerged in a muffled demo quality contrasts sharply against the starker sounding and ornate instrumentation and the echoing, choral background vocals. it creates a strange but ... read more

an exceedingly ambitious and often beautiful concept album, a genre-blending existential odyssey that effortlessly mixes and transitions between everything from gentle folk balladry, instrumental ambience, psychedelic electronica/rap and texturally enormous post-rock in a seamless and frankly magical blending of musical modes and emotional tones. the lo-fi elements of IDMTHY and Scrapyard are (haha) ghosted and scrapped entirely for pristine technical polish, the production is unbelievably ... read more

Many things in the music and video of Dark Magic point toward life1 being the cult concept album that Quadeca alluded to as an idea of his in the past. The music opens in a disturbing manner, with horns giving way to overwhelming walls of effects and guitar distortion and an instance of low-pitch, pained groaning that wouldn’t sound out of place in a horror production. The video is similarly terrifying in its depiction of a half-naked Quadeca levitating a mutilated and deformed mass of ... read more

Unprecedented levels of mid. Julian on autotune isn’t inherently a bad thing (just listen to Instant Crush) but the way he uses it here sounds unpleasantly manufactured and distractingly plastic. The production and instrumental are serviceably catchy but unexciting. The quality of the rest of the album remains to be seen but I fear we may be seeing the band in its first truly washed era.