“Shout Out Louds” have made dreamy indie for nearly two decades. Their first couple of albums being key staples of my teenage years and provide a nostalgic haven for me to this day.
“Ill Wills” is a small instrumental piece that has always resonated with me. Its glockenspiel toylike lead melody and washed out distorted rhythm guitar creates a nostalgic quality first listen. It creates a track that’s short, sweet and well worth a listen:
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Telefon Tel Aviv’s album “Immolate yourself” has both haunted and compelled me since its release in 2009. Its understated songs always downplay the heady heights synth pop usually aims for. It leaves the album with a macabre aesthetic that really grows on you with repeat listens.
The Birds starts the album and although rather simple in its arrangement and composition, every instrument is driving the track forward. Creating a constant crescendo for the first half of the track, only to drop off briefly before a distorted synth semi-solo that falls apart as soon as it begins. Back into the sounds of arpeggiated synths and repetitive electronic drums.
In a modern EDM world with humongous FM synth leads and all consuming Kick drums. The birds in a masterwork in understatement, achieving the same results emotionally without ever pushing for it.
All these years later on and with repeat listens, its subtlety’s still grow on me. Its a track that has and will always stick around:
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This track with its washes of lo-fi synths distorting their way into landscapes of reverb and noise makes it share the same sonic soundscapes as many tracks in the vapourwave genre.
Over the duration of the track the blissful synth and guitar elements are slowly corrupted with further distortion until they are relics of their former selves. Quivering under the duress of white noise and tape hiss until they finally collapse abruptly into nothingness. It’s this powerful use of processing that creates the mood of the piece and drives the track forward. Turning a fairly minimalist composition into something far greater:
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Toro Y Moi creates quirky electronic music which fuses different styles of American pop music through his distinct lens.
“New House” is my favorite track from his album “Outer Peace”. This brief down tempo track has auto tuned vocals that mix well with the digital sounding FM synth looping sample. It creates a very cool, laid back style that suits repeat listens:
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The Flaming Lips are probably my favorite band. I have listened to them on and off since my mid teens and each time I go back to their work i find more things to love. Their experimental use of composition and instrumentation, mixed with lyrics that manage to talk about the human condition but in a often more cerebral and surreal way, creates a unique world that’s often imitated but never re-created.
I started listening to them again recently because of the podcast “Sorcerer’s Orphan” where Steven Drozed and other current/ex members of the flaming lips break down individual tracks to tell you how they were made and the ideas behind the process. For a fan it’s a great insight into many of the tracks. It’s well worth a listen for anyone who’s interested in The Flaming Lips or song construction in general.
There are many tracks to recommend from their back catalog and I have recommend several I the past. However, Looking back through my blog posts on the Flaming Lips the first track that stood out to me as missing was “Silver Trembling Hands” So I had to rectify this now by making it my track of the week.
“Silver Trembling hands” manages to have one of my favorite changes in music. The verses are drum lead aggressive pieces of tension and momentum that melt away into masses of tape delay and reverb in the choruses, Reminiscent of some of the greatest moments from Pink Floyd. Its a true joy that gets me every time I hear the track. I hope you get as much from it as I do:
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I really like the album “Remind Me Tomorrow” by Sharon Van Etten. It manages to create a dark, sweltering world of sound that blends a more standard rock band set up with powerful synths and experimental sound design.
It was really hard to pick one particular track from an album that has so many stand out pieces. Eventually I decided to go for “Jupiter 4,” which (I’m guessing ) is named after the iconic Roland synthesiser. It’s sounds are all over this album, and are used in this track to create the rasping bass pad effect. This creates a foundation of a dark and brooding sound that is enhanced by the tracks down tempo percussion and Sharon Van Ettens vocal delivery.
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On the self titled Rezzett EP, many styles of dance music are created with lo-fi elements that have really stuck with me over the past few weeks.
This murky sonic vision controls and occasionally overpowers the Album. But it does provide a direction that shows a sporadic mix of genre like Jungle, Ambient, techno and house to all blended together throughout the albums well paced playtime.
With its extreme lo-fi sound i have personally found the work to sound its best on hi-if systems or headphones. With flatter studio monitors the sound seems just a little too dark for me. But that shouldn’t stop the majority of people really liking it.
“Gremlinz” was the first track that really stood out to me with on the First listen. The heavily bit reduced fast pitching synth sound that sounds close to a mario coin pickup SFX provides a catchy hook to the track that grabs you and pulls you into its massively distorted and compressed bass line and de-tuning arpeggiated synth. Just like the rest of the album, songs succeed because of their melodies and composition. Without those qualities enhancing the lo-fi sound it would be very easy to fall flat.
Fortunately Rezzett manages to prove that a great collection of core ideas in composition will stand against any sonic style you throw at it and when you can big risks away from the sonic norms of modern production really pay dividends:
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“Quadraluv” is right up my street. The distorting pads, wide sonic ambiances and driving drums that turn from an electronic kit to the amen break create a sound that can be enjoyed almost anywhere:
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“Skyla” is an electronic track that creates a dark and brooding feel by focusing on the low end. It’s repetitive electronic kick drum drives a track of mostly percussive elements, including a Tom/ second kick that’s pitch drifts down deep into sub frequencies, and there is a clicking resonant filter to provide the higher frequency content of the piece.
It’s the strong sense of mood that attracted me to the piece the most. It creates an emotional resonance using only electronic elements that stood out to me in a playlist of hundreds of other pieces of electronic music, so I thought I should highlight it here:
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I’ve been going through electronic albums I missed from last year over the past few weeks and came across this little gem.
Gacha Bakradze album “world colour” is, for the most part, an experimental affair, but it has this more traditional track which I was initially drawn to on first listen.
“The Prayer” offers a work reminiscent of earlier warp records stuff with an ambient minimalist melody driven by harder electronic drums. However, it adds a deep sub bass giving it a more modern twist. It manages to both play on my nostalgia for some of my favourite electronic music and keep it modern and forward thinking:
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