Nurture

Fantano's review of nurture:

hello everyone, Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest nerd. and it's time for a review of the new Rorter Robinson LP: Nurture

Nurture is the long-awaited sophomore LP from electronic artist Porter Robinson, who I've been highly critical of in the past - His Debut, Worlds mostly just hit me as... average. Worlds had some great ideas on the surface, however, I felt it sounded flat, overly compressed, and just didn't pull off its ambition very well.

However, the singles that porter has been sharing since January of 2020 seemed to be moving in a more interesting sound, drawing influences from J-pop, modern indie records, and of course his own breed of EDM

Going into this album, I had far higher hopes than I did going into his debut, because of singles like "Something Comforting", which featured bright, poppy instrumentation and much better textures than on most of his last album

On the flip side however there was Mirror, a single that failed to impress me on every front. Featuring insufferable sounding high-pitched vocals. The entire album is filled with them, but they don't always hit the way there are supposed to. These high-pitched vocals seemed way too repetitive, as they stayed somewhat consistent throughout the entire project. But they do add a nice bit of flavor to many tracks, just not Something everybody will find desirable.

The album already seemed to be more ambitious and mature than his last record, following a more raw aesthetic and boasting a tracklist 14 songs long, and over 1 hour of musical material, so in general I was excited to see what he brought on this new LP

The album is more experimental, as shown by tracks like the introduction, *Track 1*, which opens the album with a curious, interesting and glitchy progression that gives way to atmospheric synths and pianos. The first 3 songs show great promise, it was looking like porter would finally reach his potential and truly make something worth the hype he gets. However, during track 4, the album takes a serious turn, And it's clear Robinson still isn't doing anything out of the ordinary on most songs here

The album mostly sounds the same, featuring the same textures and sounds throughout its dragging 1-hour runtime.
and at the end, porter breaks into this extra hyper, J-pop, over the top anime beat with loud ear rapey drums and high pitched Japanese lyrics

It mostly just hit me as weird and a little bit out-of-character for this mostly down-to-earth synthpop LP.
Especially since most of the record was actually pleasant to the ear. Porter seemed to be trying to copy the hyper pop scene for clout

It was a little bit disappointing, and it took down the enjoyment of this album for me quite a bit.

On worlds, the final 3 songs seemed to meet porter's ambition, but on Nurture, porter just drowns the whole mix in his Caramelldansen Live Edit

The album literally seems to make no sense to me. It has no consistent theme, whatever theme it had was broken in the last handful of tracks, especially when he just started screaming "I'M BOUT TO HIT THE BOOF" in autotune for the last 15 minutes. Just go do it, man.

overall I'm feeling a decent to strong 9 on this one
tran-
sistion
did you give this album a listen did you love it did you hate it let me know in the comments below
oh and whoop 3:1 dislike ratio wtf porter stans?