LISTEN!
This is a page spun off of fun links dedicated to wordy discussion of audio-poetic media. It's a music review section! Specifically, reviews for music you might never hear about elsewhere, and which I want to convince you to listen to.
I don't like rating things out of stars. It's just not an effective way to communicate — it fundamentally lacks the capacity for nuance, no matter how many half-stars and quarter-stars you try to break it into. The best thing a star rating can ever be is a useless hanger-on to an actual articulated review. Therefore, you will find no stars anywhere on this page, except for the ones on album covers. My ratings are instead composed of these two major organs:
- An instrumentality-lyricism (I/L) balance. I like music at all stops along this spectrum, from straight instrumentals to spoken word poetry, so this is not a value judgement in any way. An equal balance between instrumental and lyrical content is not "perfect"! But it's useful to make a note of which part I'm focusing most on for a given piece.
- An emotional locus. So maybe this could just be called a "mood", but "emotional locus" is way more fun, and it's widely known that coming up with silly, overly-verbose names for various stats and attributes is one of the funnest things there is. Anyway — music is situational. A song has more positive potential when it aligns with your emotional locus, and a misalignment will make you focus on the negatives. For instance, upbeat songs in an angsty locus feel grating and insincere; angsty songs in an upbeat locus feel stupid and melodramatic. It's up to you to identify and map your own emotional states, but I'll provide a reference to one or two that I think will let you get the most out of the music in question.
I'm not interested in giving any of these pieces a rigorous, brutally honest examination. If this was a site for, like, dishwasher reviews? No holds fucking barred. That's a Product, and a Product deserves nothing but merciless utilitarianism. But I genuinely love every single thing featured on this page, and I'm going to encourage you all to listen to them no matter what. You're not risking anything by checking these works out, so I'm not going to tell you you need to keep your guard up. Not like with dishwashers, which will cost you several hundred dollars and a lot of inconvenience if you get the wrong one. Like, for example, one with a fucking touch-selector interface on the inside of the door that will sometimes randomly break and can't be troubleshot or worked around and you literally just have to wait for it to start working again, NOT THAT I HAVE A HORSE IN THIS RACE OR ANYTHING, ELECTROLUX.
Also, for some of these artists, I'm reasonably sure that I personally account for between ten and ninety percent of their active listenership, and it would feel morally dickish to try and leverage negativity out of that. That being said — hold on there's a part of Brave New World I can quote about this.
The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio– rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord—a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began.
Basically: awareness of something's flaws is sometimes essential to its full appreciation. In this vein, each review will include a short descriptor of the work "at its worst." Everything has bad parts, after all, and even though I'm not interested in quantifying, enumerating, and excoriating every last one of them, I think it's okay to make a note of how something falls short when it inevitably does. There is going to be discord, and I'm just going to tell you if it's more kidney pudding or pig dung in my opinion. Decide for yourself if I'm being reasonable in my critiques. I'd love for you to find my impugnations false.
THE REVIEWS
| micromusic | ||||||
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Okay, this is probably cheating, because micromusic is an entire website (and, honestly, a lifestyle,) but some of my genuine favorite songs of all time were one-off releases by random artists on here and I don't know how else to include them. Some of the other albums on this page are by artists I originally found by browsing micromusic. You need an account to view the whole site, which must be manually approved by an admin, which happens... extremely infrequently. micromusic is very much past its heyday, but I encourage you to check it out anyway. You can listen to the radio without logging in, and you can download songs off there if you're a little savvy (inspect element > network). Go find your own favorites! If you do manage to get into the rest of the site, I encourage you to go exploring. There's more than 25 years of history here — they have event coverage from live shows, recommendations for hard- and software tools, merchandise that never got to a production run but you can dream about owning anyway, and the majority of plural nouns end in z. It's the holy grail of 00s indie electronica culture. | |||||
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| 8-bit lagerfeuer by pornophonique | ||||||
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Some people's immediate reaction to 8-bit lagerfeuer might be, "ew, European nerdcore chip-rock from 2007?" Other people might say, "fuck yes, European nerdcore chip-rock from 2007!" I, personally, have come to see the bright side of dated video game references used as metaphors for breaking up with your girlfriend. We all liked 3D Virtual Buddies, didn't we? Are things really so much different now? And you don't even need to think about things like "zeitgeist" or "aesthetic ethos" to recognize that sometimes it's just fun to bop to stuff while you chop up a bunch of sticks in your yard or whatever. And 8-bit lagerfeuer is fun. Even the sad songs are fun! It's good bardic entertainment. It's all your favorite stories, told with an accompaniment of peppy sequencers and classic gamer words. There are extra lives, there are high scores, and you better fucking believe there are gold coins. Embrace it. You can love 8-bit lagerfeuer. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. | |||||
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| A Figure 8, A Mess by Bunny The Girl | ||||||
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Everyone needs an acoustic-guitar-based vent album they can rely on in their darkest hours. Some may claim this isn't true; I acknowledge the theoretical possibility of a person whose emotions can genuinely only be reflected in sufficiently pretentious microgenres, but I don't think they exist on Earth. Maybe somewhere, someday, a cruel pharaoh will raise a child on nothing but ambient field recordings in order to create the first pure and unimpeachable album, but until then we have guitars and laptops and bad days. A Figure 8, A Mess has been there for me for ten years, following a chance encounter in the youtube algorithm, and I don't think it's falling off any time soon. It bites too deep. I have cried and screamed to this album, and I've also fallen asleep, and done dishes, and walked to school, and generally grown up and lived my life under its purview. I think you can understand more and bigger things when you have an album like this on your side. A Figure 8, A Mess can't tell you exactly why you're so angry and sad, but it can tell you why someone was angry and sad, once upon a time, and you can work with that. And — this is important — A Figure 8, A Mess won't try to talk you out of any of that anger or sadness. It's not gonna call the cops on you. Its provisions are catharsis, and vindication, and, once you're done being angry and sad, a high-ceilinged echo of what it's like to feel something so intensely it briefly takes up the entire world. | |||||
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| Vocal Marole | ||||||
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"This is like the third or fourth Tony Domenico project you've recommended on this site!" Shut up! It's good! Vocal Marole is a two-album suite of instrumental storytelling — plus textual and pictorial storytelling, with the included story.html files or on the website. Even without reading the accompanying documents, you can feel that something is happening over the course of each album. These songs represent places, people, moments, and ideas on a scope both precise and universal. It's captivating. Sometimes I put on either of the Maroles while I work, and I end up getting distracted zoning out and becoming part of this little world. Like its famous younger sibling, Vocal Marole will make you feel a lot of emotions without giving away exactly where they're coming from. This is not your typical lo-fi chiptune to relax slash study to; if you don't pay attention, you will find yourself roiling with unexpected hope and malaise. If you're receptive to the psychic tunes, that is. Results shown are real but not guaranteed. It's still a good listen just for the sounds. Whee! | |||||
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| meaningless off-screen death by ivy sinthetic | ||||||
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I don't have a long history with meaningless off-screen death yet, but I sure expect to have one eventually. This album is so dynamic and full of emotion, I feel like it's not even fair to have it all in one place. The dosage is almost too high. ALMOST. Thankfully, it's not, and you are free to listen to it six hundred times in a row without it losing any of its punch. It just doesn't wear out. This strength comes from its variability; the difference between the emotional highs and lows crossed with the rhythmic slows and fasts creates something that covers a huge breadth of feeling in a short amount of time. It's efficient, without feeling like it was created with anything as dreadfully corporate as "efficiency" in mind. What it does feel like is fourteen beautiful crystal splinters embedded in your body. meaningless off-screen death works its way into you, and by the third listen you can hear it coming from inside. This is not as gruesome as it sounds, I promise. I love it. Please listen to it. | |||||
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| The Loser by Hoverman | ||||||
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Ethical disclaimer: the creator of this album is a tumblr mutual of mine, but I liked this music before that happened. I received no compensation, financial or otherwise, for this review. I have received no compensation for anything ever. I am not endorsed by anyone. I'm barely even alive.
The Loser has been my go-to programming music for a while now. It's the perfect flavor of upbeat and dynamic to stave off the despair of troubleshooting my garbage code, and when I finally get something right, it feels like it's celebrating along with me. Don't let the humorous self-deprecation in this review, or the title of the album itself, fool you: this music makes me happy to be awake, and dare I say it, alive. It's the perfect soundtrack for a really nice day in April that reminds you that life has the potential to be, actually, pretty alright sometimes — without being overly saccharine. Even if you're in a bad mood, The Loser still sounds great. It has depth, it won't condescend to you. The only thing it can't do is make you feel worse. You don't even have to write any javascript while you listen; this is also great making-dinner music, or doing-chores music, or even "just-chilling" music. There's really no reason not to listen to it. |
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| combat magick by maddest kings alive | ||||||
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combat magick is not for the faint of heart. It's loud, fast, noisy, and bald-faced electronic, particularly in the first half. It makes me want to punch a wall, but my house is lath and plaster and I'd break my hand. If only someone would invent some kind of non-destructive bodily movement one could perform in conjunction with music, in order to express energy and emotions in a positive way. Until then, the D in IDM will continue to stand for Drywall, and young-to-middle-aged people everywhere will just have to deal with their broken fingers.
The latter half of combat magick is a lot more relaxed, though the sound profile still carries through. It's less drywall-punching and more standing pensively in the debris field, covered in gypsum dust, wondering why you made the decisions you did. And then the high energy comes back one last time in the relentlessly positive final track, which almost has the character of a theme song, and you're ready for another round. This is the album to listen to if you need to go for something. Doesn't matter what. Go for it. Take a concentrated hit of drama, get hyped, go to the DMV or whatever. That's the magick. |
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