ok so start as I mean to go on, I mostly wanna use this place to vent about music I find completely magical and why I find it magical, and just to look at pretty stuff one day I'll probably rationalize it with smart words and stuff but I spend a lot of time thinking about what I think makes a great pop song in the age of electronic music being the primary way pop music is made, and I feel like I've mostly boiled it down to the song being a framework that carries these like, tiny little moments of perfection that creep up on you and suddenly they're everything in your world and just as fast as they came in they fade out, and I just need to hear it again and again, and I want to capture these moments and live in them over and over like a tiny note residing in a dimension of pure Feelings stretched out over what feels like forever if you told me a few months ago that there would be an album pretty much entirely comprised of those moments happening one after another i'd probably either think you were bullshitting or demand with extreme fury to know where it is. but I think also I would have felt a bit skeptical, like, wouldn't that be total overload, would it kill how special the individual moments are, would it just be too much great in one place where those small ideas could have made entire amazing songs on their own this Dawn Richard album is that album and it snuck up on me and changed how I see a lot of stuff. It really is an endless succession of moments all of which feel like intense microclimates, the sheer size of everything on this album is pretty overwhelming even when it gets broken down to a languid, staticky crawl like in Swim Free or the I'll see you in my head refrain in Projection. and it has this quality about it that i value in a lot of music where it feels, idk if this is a bullshit word but like, impressionistic, where you can hear and feel the many brush strokes the music is composed of, the love and thought put into each, and it's a really human aspect to it that shines through the blaring electronics that shift all over the place and it's kind of one of the best things i've heard like, maybe ever??? i might be being dramatic or rash about that but i dunno. it really is incredible. i'm still not 100% convinced that "everything at once" composition is a good idea and there's a really inexplicable loud and empty pop-dubstep radio single in Phoenix that sticks out like a sore thumb among all the other songs almost betraying the overall vision I got from the album. but overall holy damn this caught me off guard and suddenly became everything.