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deadcactuswalking · 1 year ago

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 02/12/2023 a.k.a. a Deep Dive into '10 Hour Deep Relaxation'

Content warning: Christmas, some language, sex and politics

Welp, it’s officially Christmastime on the chart, and I really wanted an easy week in the first place. So thankfully they gave me one, no debuts in the top 75, “Lovin’ on Me” by Jack Harlow is still at #1, I’m going to do the rundown, two reviews for song suggestions and dip. Welcome to perhaps the least essential episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

Rundown

Brenda Lee’s at #14, Mariah’s at #6 and for the first time this year, a Christmas song is in the top five: “Last Christmas” by Wham!. This means that I’m in the space every year when I can mess with the structure because there is no ordinary chart week from now on, and I’m kind of glad because things tend to get busy this time of year anyway. Our top five is rounded out by “greedy” by Tate McRae at #4, “Prada” by casso, RAYE and D-Block Europe at #3, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan surprisingly at #2 and of course, Jack Harlow coming in for a third week at the top.

Whilst we’re discussing the non-holly and non-jolly songs on the chart, there are a few gains and returns that have nothing to do with the holidays. Drake’s “IDGAF” featuring Yeat returns to #61 in the stead of “You Broke My Heart”, which drops off from its debut last week, and then we have “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims gaining at #53. We then may as well bid adieu to the songs falling victim to the holiday plague this week, also known as our notable dropouts. They peaked in the top 40 or stayed in the UK Top 75, which is what I cover, for five weeks, but now they’re out, and they are: “Nice to meet you” by PinkPantheress featuring Central Cee, “Seven” by Jung Kook featuring Latto, “adore u” by Fred again.. and Obongjayar, “Desire” by Calvin Harris and Sam Smith, “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish, “Daylight” by David Kushner, “Calm Down” by Rema, assisted by the remix with Selena Gomez, “Another Love” by Tom Odell and of course, “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers.

Now for the surge of festivities - I’ve already told you the three highest and that’s all I’ll tell you for now until they creep higher into the top five. As for now, as with all Christmas weeks, I’ll only mention the songs that are making it to the top 75 for the first time for this year’s round in this week, or songs reaching new peaks. In the first category, we see the grand returns of “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade at #70, “Feliz Navidad” by Jose Feliciano at #60, “One More Sleep” by Leona Lewis at #58, “I Wish it Could be Christmas Everyday” by WIzzard at #55, “Mistletoe” by Justin Bieber at #54, “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney at #52, “Sleigh Ride” by the Ronettes at #51, “Step into Christmas” by Elton John at #47, “Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea at #46, “Holly Jolly Christmas” by Michael Bublé at #45, “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by the late John Lennon and Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band and the Harlem Community Choir at #44 - only time I’m saying that one, always a relief. The sooner we get to that mouthful, the better. We then continue with “Snowman” by Sia at #40 and “Merry Christmas” by Ed Sheeran and Elton John at #17, with the Amazon original tracks “Stay Another Day” by Jorja Smith and “You’re Christmas to Me” by Sam Ryder reaching new peaks of #38 and #23 respectively.

And whilst we’re here, if I covered the entire top 100, which I have an array of reasons why I don’t but they’re becoming increasingly irrelevant, I would still only be reviewing one song: “#skeptacore pt. 3” by Ryder and Skepta, a cute little wistful weightless grime remix of a Skepta track that I actually checked out when it was released a month or two ago.I’m holding out for it to stick past Christmas because it’s actually pretty brilliant. If it doesn’t end up in the top 75 in January, well... it got Best of the Week in absentia. Let’s review randomly-selected songs from the batch provided to me by viewers like you.

SUGGESTED REVIEWS

Suggestion #1

Like Santa pulls gifts from his sack, I pulled out two randomly-selected song suggestions from the 49 that I now have, except I excluded a certain suggestion submission because he… sorry, it’s anonymous. SOMEONE added like morbillion songs so I actually chose from 20, and then I chose from 19, because someone else suggested Travis Scott’s “FE!N” as if I hadn’t reviewed it before. Regardless, our first suggestion is “Like a River” by Frederico featuring Tiffany Aris. Frederico is a German producer hiring Brussels-based singer Tiffany Aris for a dance-pop effort and it’s pretty effective. It has a decent amount of melodrama with the unnecessary reverb and how it starts with an overwhelming level of synth suffocation, and it almost reminds me of 2013’s weird blend of folk and EDM given the heavy and sometimes pretty stripped use of acoustic guitars as the main melody in the verses, it reminds me of “Counting Stars” especially with the snaps and several dusty layers of acoustics that eventually propel into a pretty typical house beat, with cascading synths pushing in during the chorus. I respect how it goes for more of a house format instead of a build-drop EDM structure, so the song - however basic its lyrics - does ground its narrative a bit more effectively. Aris is a good singer and whilst the chorus does feel cluttered with the several attempts at a hook, which only gets worse when she starts doing vocal riffs and backing vocals eventually, she is surprisingly emotive throughout all of it. As a song, it’s functionally fine, but it’s also just not my thing, honestly. I can appreciate a lot of genres but this kind of phase-through-you dance-pop glut feels more fitting for an advert than being on Spotify as a full song, and I do think it runs out of steam by the end. Like I said, the chorus throws a lot of hook melodies at you, in a pretty rushed fashion, and we get a song that sacrifices its respect for catchiness. That wouldn’t be a problem if those hooks were more punctuated or really damn good, but what we have here just isn’t all too up to par. Sorry.

Suggestion #2

Our second suggestion is… a bit unorthodox. One joker suggested one song and one song only, “10 Hour Rain, Thunder, and Lightning | Deep Relaxation, Meditation, and Sleep”. The song I assume they meant by this, the highest search result on Spotify and only one I could find with that exact name, even down to the Oxford commas, is far from 10 hours. In fact, it’s five minutes and three seconds. Released in 2022 on the label Truefin Music, which seems to be one guy, who is the same guy the song is credited to. It may be by “10 Hour Deep Relaxation” but in reality it’s by a self-declared “music man” from Miami, Florida, who also goes by Bluefin Music online. He released his first single in 2018 under the name Tropical Punk, and it’s a cute little Spanish jam called “Mar y Sol” that whilst amateurly mixed as one would expect, is actually decently professional and very fun for what it is. I could see it as a theme song for a show about some groovy Hispanic surfers, I don’t know, it’s fun. He released a second song in 2019, “Dragonfly_summernight”, and it’s not great, it’s more ambitious than the last as well as being slower and in English, and it just doesn’t feel like a very natural fit. He could have usually found himself in this pop rock lane though. It sounds a bit like a local band rather than a singer-songwriter but with some refinement I can see a lot of appeal in this sound that’s informed by 80s soft rock cheese whilst still being relatively contemporary and with an… interesting vocal take. Hell, I actually really like the bridge and think it’s a pretty inspired little detour. So, naturally, after I found out that the 10 Hour Deep Relaxation guy was a failed two-song singer-songwriter, real name Gustavo Ordunez, it’s not doxing if it’s on Spotify, I checked his social media to see if there was any explanation to why he switched to the ambient stuff. So I looked through ALL of his Tweets. Or Xeets, I suppose.

We do get kind of a story here. In 2011, he Tweets that he made his account because he has a chance of winning $1000, and maybe that budget when to recording his two songs, who knows? He appears to have been romantically involved with one “jellsbells07”, whom he pretty consistently made loving posts towards, and called her the prettiest white girl he knew. On March 5th, 2012, he posted that she was a dick, and then a minute later, that she was the “most beautiful lady in all the lands”. In November, he got a new phone and by December, he was making passive-aggressive Tweets about a girl missing out on Italian food, and given some other Tweets at this time, they may have broken up, as in early 2013, he Tweeted that he was on the cusp of reanimation, went to strip clubs, and in April, Tweeted separately: “Man mode active” and “#thisbitch”.

He started being all profound in May of 2013 before the end of the month where, maybe they didn’t break up, maybe it was temporary, maybe all this time they were friends, who knows? Either way, he started Tweeting jellsbells again, notifying her that he was listening to 2Pac outside of a Starbucks, “#thuglife”. Then he started tracking his runs, which he does for like half a decade on Twitter. Interestingly enough, in October of 2013, he was still Tweeting his possible former lover jellsbells with stuff like “Real man breakfast” and how someone “don’t need no women”, which just seems like harassment at that point but I’m sure I’m missing some needed context and deleted or private replies. In November, he Tweeted possibly the best one liner of all time: “Don’t piss and text. #splashmountain”.

By December of 2013, he was defnitely dating jellsbells again because he was hornyposting on main, and we find that he is still in education during February of 2014. He was grinding at the gym this year, setting “impressive cardio records” and being generally appreciate of human anatomy, stating that “thumbs totally […] rock”. He gets a bit boring talking about his workouts and biceps in brief anecdotes, but on Christmas Day… he posts feet. To be clear, he actually just retweets an image someone else had posted showing three people, one of which is Ordunez, with varying levels of footwear. I don’t know which one is him, but there’s feet regardless.

He once again started to Tweet reclusive, fake-woke one-liners in 2015, ones that I’m sure he’d be embarrassed by now, as well as continuing to track his runs. In May of that year, he Tweeted, without context, “Lol irony”, and in June, “I care for you. I really do, I really do”. I hope jellsbells07 is okay.

That month, he went on a bunch of runs and listened to Paramore’s “Ain’t it Fun”, and he was actually really active during this time but I can’t lie, most of it is abstract and slightly insufferable non-Tweets that are half-poetic. In July, he Tweeted, “the microchip has been compromised” and in August, “I beats meats man”. These are not the only political posts I could find from our protagonist, he Tweeted against capitalism in September, but I just like the dichotomy. He touched a manatee in February of 2016 and continued to track his runs. That’s what he spent most of the year doing, he didn’t Tweet much that year so I assume it was an inward-looking year. He had some what appear to be post-breakup posts, retweeted Neil deGrasse Tyson and some posts criticising Donald Trump, but that kind of appears to be it.

It’s much of the same in 2017, with even less of a Twitter presence, the vast majority of it being tracking his runs through the same third-party app, which he probably forgot was still doing that. In December, however, he did Tweet that his big regret from 2011 was “not staying in school full-time”, which is… interesting, given that he’d been more outwardly depressive and political in the years before? In January of 2018, he was actually still quoting and tagging jellsbells, and this seems to align with a new brief period of activity early this year, with mostly very positive, wholesome Tweets about how he’s blessed and filled with love, posting a rare selfie in April and yes, still tracking his runs. Possibly my favourite Tweet from him is on May 1st, 2018, and it reads: “BOY DO I LOVE DOING STUFF FOR PEOPLE I LIKE”.

In June, however, he had another one of those semi-poetic, vaguely coherent breaking down moments, which came with a lot of Tweeting as well, some of which was oddly funny, like him quote-Tweeting a picture of a snake in a boot from a year prior, questioning why he’s thinking about it, but most of it just seems a bit sad, but by August, he says he was in bliss… and thanked Taco Bell for words of wisdom. In October, he retweeted Russell Brand. I think he knew. In November, he released his debut single.

He went on a bit of a Twitter break until January of 2019, wherein he got even more abstract, with a lot of motivational weirdness throughout that entire year, and by the entire year, I meant two years because he was doing this in 2020 as well. In fact, he took most of 2019 off - despite apparently playing a gig around 2018 and 2019 time, probably to do with his single release - and returned to Twitter in July of 2020. It got borderline conspiratory at times. In November, he started streaming on Twitch, but he doesn’t have any VODs so I couldn’t find anything of interest. It seems like he was doing some gaming but also just livestreaming his musical creative process, which is really cool. He streamed on Twitch pretty constantly during the last two months of 2020, but he hasn’t Tweeted since 2021 or liked anything since 2022. Truefin Music appears to be his brand, I think he’s from Cuba, he seems like a decent guy, I just genuinely have no idea why he made this pivot other than I guess the streaming money but he didn’t announce it anywhere. Maybe he’s kind of ashamed? I don’t know, maybe I would be too.

It’s beautiful but also a bit worrying that I have created this perspective of Ordunez. I don’t really know much about this guy, but I also feel like I know everything from this journey. I’ve just created a guy, a character. In my mind, he’s married to jellsbells07 and he still listens to 2Pac outside of a Starbucks, just now the clean version in his car with his one-year-old son in the passenger seat. Maybe he made the 10-hour meditation single to stop him from crying.

For the record, his relaxation release isn’t even great, it’s a stream-trolling, maybe even stolen ambient palette that isn’t really dynamic enough to feel effectively like ambiance. It’s honestly quite the opposite, at least to me, it’s a bunch of fuzz most of the time instead of being what it describes itself as, but from what I see on his Twitter, the man is honest to a fault and also somewhat pretentious, but willing to put himself out there. I’ve looked through all this man’s non-reply Tweets - maybe the replies could be a further episode - and the singles he made in the late 2010s make so much more sense to me than this 2022 pivot, and it’s pretty telling that he only released the one ambient track.

I would like to end this weird, unexpected way of handling this suggestion by reciting two consecutive Tweets made by Gustavo “10 Hour Deep Meditation” Ordunez in 2013 that particularly resonated with me, and I think will provide a great deal of closure to our story. Ahem…

“A little nonsense, now and then, is relished by the wisest men.” “You know what guys get for free? Handjobs. From ourselves.”

Thanks for everything, Gustavo.

Conclusion

Hopefully next week there’ll be people starting to clammer for that Christmas #1? Or you know, anything at all? But I can’t lie, these slow weeks where I can have a nap and wake up to doing a really simple, dry episode… kind of growing on me, man. If you read this, thanks? Rest in peace to Shane MacGowan, and I’ll see you next week.

#pop music #song review #uk singles chart #christmas #10 hour deep relaxation

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