The beats are pumping and the drops are le falling. This is an electronic album with a great mix of club vibes and cheesy summer jams. Let’s party, shall we?
The songs Overdrive and Slow Acid are real highlights for me. They’re among the most club-like tracks with pretty typical drops that make the crowd throw down. But the bass line in Overdrive is so damn good, it makes the song more than its drop which I feel is important for this kind of music. It’s like with deathcore: you know they have breakdowns, so there has to be something else of substance too to make the song stand out and worth your time. Though Slow Acid does remind me a little bit of that funny YouTube video about long build-ups and disappointing drops it still just sounds cool and has a massive body on a good sound system. If you have one, crank it up there because the sound is huge and loud music is plain fun.
The song Open Wide is the low-point for me on this album. Though the drop in the chorus is pretty good and bouncy, the lyrics are just too obnoxious. I can deal with this genre’s usual superficial lyrics, which we hear on most of the tracks on here that include singing (note that my two top songs are both instrumental - here you have part of the reason for that). But they’re too stupid to ignore on Open Wide, so I’ll skip that whenever I come back to this album in the future.
I can’t help but think about why the lyrics bother me. I’m hardcore into metal, and metal has a lot of lyrics that you just cannot take seriously - neither should you and perhaps the same is true for this music. I guess the question is what makes this different from metal lyrics and why do I cringe at this but not songs about disfigurement, homicide, and torture?
My initial thought is that for far most metal, I experience no intent on part of the artist to expect me to think the lyrics matter. This is a point on a scale for me, and with bands like Meshuggah and their album obZen, I actually do find their lyrics worth investing some time of analysis in. The same is true for albums like Metallica’s Master of Puppets, where the lyrics are about real struggles, both inner and outer ones, mental and physical, as well as their relationship. On the other end of the scale, you have bands like blog-favorites Abominable Putridity and Disfiguring the Goddess. Their lyrics are just pure entertainment to me. I can hardly read anything into them nor decipher actual words while listening to the song, and they are just trying to fit with what the music expresses. The songs are sonically violent, fast and aggressive, so I expect lyrics with a sentiment that mirrors those aspects. In terms of meaning, they’re entirely ironic and represent a willingness to push the boundaries of entertainment into the absurd.
The problem for me with the song Open Wide on this album is that I cannot tell to which degree I should (or can) take these lyrics seriously. The way I see it, the song is about a guy getting a dirty text from a party of interest, or a former one, and now brags about how great his life is due to his ability to be,
“Turnin' clubs into houses
Water to champagne fountains
Turn flat chests into mountains “
Besides the perpetuation of female beauty standards, the glorification of wasting expensive products, and the nonsensical idea of wanting to turn clubs into houses, the subject is just not interesting or desirable, especially because of how the person in question chooses to handle the situation. He wants to boast about what he has accomplished to someone he believes should care about it, but the content of his bragging is childish at best and sexist at worst, the main line of the chorus being just an indirect request to have fellatio performed on him.
In contrast to the last kind of metal lyrics I mentioned, the problem here is that the lyrics are not so outlandish to be something no one or few enough people would ever seriously say that I feel he is not serious about it. Someone who says it genuinely would come across to me as thoroughly unlikable, and if not genuinely, it is, again, a childishly low form of humor.
All that said - I realize that was a lot of talk about not very much except a conceptual problem I have with some approaches to music - I do like this album. It’s enjoyable and varied, which is key to me. There is a surprisingly small amount of those typical build-ups I mentioned in the beginning, so the songwriting doesn’t become stale and uniform. The fact that the songs also vary between being instrumental and having vocals is also great. Those without a singer carry their own weight in the music alone, which is super important for such music. I recommend it as what it is to me; part of my early exploration of this genre. If you’re not deeply invested in electronic music but have a curious nature like I do, check this one out, find your favorite tracks on it, and indulge in its great production too.
The album is available for streaming on Spotify and purchase on iTunes.
dededos
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
2087
snowghoul
stormborns
