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declanlikesmusic · 1 year ago

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Listening Highlights: Episode 001

August 13th to 20th, 2023

Hello! Just as soon as I've started a new series, I've decided to put it off and make a new series! (Expect this.) Trying to keep up with daily posts was simply not worth it. Much as I was so excited to kick that series off, I thankfully decided to turn it off before it became too much of a chore for me and I'm glad that I did. Because now, we have a different format to substitute it!

Welcome to Listening Highlights, where I go over what I've been listening to as of recently! There's no set time for each episode, I just talk about music when I feel Autistic enough to do it. I also wanted to be more selective with what I talk about this time around; for the most part, that didn't happen, I'm just so Autistic that I went over pretty much all of the past week. So let's go!

Drake – If You're Reading This It's Too Late (2015)

The first thing I listened to after the last Today's Listens episode, I spent that morning with the 6 God himself, the man behind such classics as Way 2 Sexy and that one line where he calls himself a lesbian. He's one of the most popular figures of music right now and it's to the point where either you detest his trajectory as one of the most bland musicians going or you're LosPollosTV. I'm in the former camp and I do not look forward to having to try out his latest records any time soon, but at least I have this mixtape to fall back on whenever I need a reminder that Drake can spit. This turned out surprisingly great & consistent. I especially loved most of the beats on here, especially the ones that were sampled on I'll Try Living Like This (a cool album & also vaporwave). The energy is great and Drake even has some touching vulnerable moments as well. I highly recommend it and probably no other Drake release.

7.8 / 10

Highlights: Legend, Energy, Know Yourself, No Tellin', Madonna, 6 God, Now & Forever, You & the 6

The rest of that day was not too interesting. I listened to Western Digital's lost signal, which was a decent vaporwave and broken transmission EP. I bring it up because its closing track, glowing (disintegration), is one of the most haunting, harrowing and almost hopeless pieces of plunderphonic music I have ever heard. I highly recommend it for that alone, it sounded like distantly watching the world burn and collapse in front of you while bunkered away. I then finally gave a listen to lilien rosarian's second album every flower in my garden, which I didn't care all too much for. As much as I appreciate the production & the pretty soundscapes, they felt much less like songs than her 2019 debut. After that, I took another very slow step in conquering waterfront dining's monotonous discography with the FEELS 感じている EP, which was actually his first release in general and not his debut album that I rated before. I cared for it even less; it was a much rougher batch of vaporwave that was particularly underproduced & repetitive.

billy woods & Kenny Segal – Maps (2023)

So I decided to go through with another 2023 release and this one I wasn't too particularly excited about. Abstract Hip Hop has been hit or miss for me most days and that's usually to do with the production, so when I heard that billy woods was joining up with producer Kenny Segal again after 2019's Hiding Places, I was even less thrilled at the idea, because I did not like that at all at the time and I only now think that album was okay. But holy shit, Maps blew my expectations way out of the water! The beats are far better here, by miles, the samples are awesome and the beat drums are consistently excellent. billy woods continues to be a great rapper but it's not usually the lyricism that sells a hip hop record to me. It's the production that helps make me wanna look into the lyrics and this album handily succeeds at letting billy shine like that. I came out of this record with so many favourites, way more memorable highlights across the board than on most other billy records I've heard so far. Extremely high recommendation, genuinely makes me feel like I've been missing something from billy's records all this time.

8.4 / 10

Highlights: Soft Landing, Soundcheck, Blue Smoke, Babylon by Bus, Year Zero, Baby Steps, The Layover, FaceTime, Houdini, Waiting Around

Skimming through some more albums here, you'll notice one of them is home to one of the biggest vaporwave & future funk songs of all time, Private Caller. This is SAINT PEPSI's split album with ショッピングワールドjp titled Winner's Circle. I wanted to give this another fair shake, just in case SP's overshadowing of JP's side comes off as undeserved. But no, that first side is genuinely some weak & weirdly produced mallsoft-ish vaporwave. Not my cup of tea in comparison to the great second half. Speaking of giving lower vaporwave albums a fair shake, when christtt tells you this is one of the best vaporwave albums of all time, it's always a coin flip as to whether that's even close. Careless Messenger Recordings✆ (division under Comtex)'s sole album Suddenly Mega is not close at all. It's one of the slowest & most lethargic listens I've had in a vaporwave album and some of its many cuts are especially poorly produced.

Skymmr – your new home (2017)

Back in 2017, there was this group of very tiny vaporwave & plunderphonics producers who were given the password to a Bandcamp page and told to run wild with it. It was a practice that, in many ways, was horrible in hindsight, with how shoddily it was managed and how toxic some of the people in the group were. But underneath all of the gunk they shoved out, one record by fellow Aussie Skymmr stood out as not only a captivating example of the extremely abstract ethos of the music released there, but also was great & conceptully fascinating. your new home is a 7-minute 7-part suite of experimental plunderphonics & vaporwave sound collage and it's very cryptic about this theme of entering a new home and it not being at all what it seems. The result is probably the only record of that collective I ever regularly came back to and it even held up for me today. It's not my highest recommendation, this is definitely a more personal thing to me, but if you're curious, do check it out.

8.4 / 10

Highlights: gazing through the window, the man in the bathroom pipe cleaning (he isn't what he says he is), isn't this your new home?

The next day, I felt like kicking off the morning with some metal and one of my girlfriend's highest recommendations was Between the Buried and Me's Colours. It was a damn great time with some incredibly high energy throughout. After that was Ariana Grande's Sweetener, not my first full-length experience with her music, but one that I decided to rate first here anyway thanks to my favourite discog diver. That evening, me and my girlfriend decided to do a discog diving listening party ourselves by listening to every song netbooks.WRLD publically released to Bandcamp, which amounted to only two and a half hours. It was an excellent time and constantly high energy & fun. I recommend his debut album ENDLESS STAIRCASE for getting into his currently short but incredibly promising catalogue.

The day after that, I slogged through DJ VLAD's frankly exhausting Hardvapour. double mix. It was an okay time with some highlights, but it frankly served as a reminder of why that submovement of vapour burned bright & fast with toxic fumes. A few months back, I was recommended You're Doomed. Be Nice. by Rob Crow's Gloomy Place and to my pleasant surprise, this was a genuinely great indie rock record. The riffs & choruses were shockingly well-written and pretty catchy, through my only gripe was how understated the majority of it sounded. Still, I fully loved my experience with that album, unlike Facade by one of vaporwave's earliest come-and-go producers Psychic LCD, which I only loved about half the time. This was a full detour into progressive electronic ambient music and hoo boy, it sure sounds like it. It's definitely an ambient album with hints of progressive electronic music. It's decent, but I just don't think it should necessarily be noticed.

stab something – the art of copyright infringement (2014)

The end of that day, I tackled the final multi-track release by the early 2010s duo of stab something, which comprised of then-upcoming vaporwave legend christtt alongside then-upcoming beloved trans songwriter & producer Jamie Paige. They went on their separate ways after this particular EP, but my god, at least it still they had the magic in them together. Their full-length self-titled album is frankly astounding; it's some of the creative, upbeat & fun glitch hop / plunderphonics records I have ever heard and while this EP is much more small-scaled by comparison, it continues what made the duo so good. It's only 15 minutes, 5 tracks but it's just as creative, upbeat & fun with glitch hop & plunderphonics as that album, albeit without fully-fledged cohesion, which is kind of in its nature. I dearly recommend both of these records, at least the sole album itself.

8.6 / 10

Highlights: in and out, cheesecake

What else have I heard this week? Well, there was this one time two vaportrap icons VAPERROR & COCAINEJESUS collaborated under the Love Potion duo moniker with their album XXX. That was amazing at the time and even now, it's still an incredibly consistent and great wave album. I also listened to non-canon by Late Arcane after hearing their great album PreQuel from this year. This was more of the same punchy and creatively chopped together vaporfunk that was provided there, although on first listen, it's a lot lesser for me by comparison. There was also the first of a series of EPs by Street Sects, Gentrification I. It was mid. Whatever magic they were forcing through on their debut album End Position might just be a fluke after all these years.

There's about five more records that I heard after that, but at this rate, I kinda don't want to say much about any of them? Not because they're bad, not really, I just cannot say any notable things about each of these records, not even as much as I already did the rest of these. I adore Everything Everything as a band, but A Fever Dream is easily one of their weakest efforts, even if it's still a bit great. This weird STAR GIRL alias I heard many years ago put out the weirdly fascinating RNBW EP almost a decade ago (what the fuck) and I decided to finally listen to its predecessor, STAR. It was much less captivating & interesting despite being kinda similar in concept.Rebecca Peake was another side-project of death's dynamic shroud members, but even when compiling songs from the first two months of recording a song every day for a year, The World's Strongest was so inconsistent that I can hardly tell you what to make of it. Bladee & Ecco2K's Crest was just not a good listen to my ears. There's a 9 minute song that felt like 6 different tracks, I had to check what I was listening to multiple times. Plus, aside from Ecco clearly singing the higher passages, for the most part, I could not tell these two apart. Call me a not-member of the Drain Gang, I guess. Finally of this batch, I checked out bodyline's ファンタジーモニター、which was another healthy serving of really deceptively simple but clearly well-produced vaporwave. I do love what they're often going for, but this was just barely my least favourite so far; still very damn good.

I wanna close out this retrospective with two albums. First being Anderson .Paak's Oxnard, which is in my opinion, one of the most underrated albums of the past decade. Not that .Paak is not popular, he clearly is, that Silk Sonic album was excellent, but before that, people were dying for another Malibu from this guy and while they ended up getting that in the form of Ventura, it was not before the music community got "let down" by Oxnard and they dragged the album for it. I think it's a great album with some excellent singing, rapping, songwriting and producing across the board. It was really slept on. Lastly, Blank Banshee just incredibly recently dropped his fifth mainline album 4D. I have a lot of thoughts that I don't even think are cohesive yet on just one listen of this brand new thing, so that's why I've decided to give it its own review on RateYourMusic that you can check out right here.

There you have it. Where I've been with music for the past week! Will I do something like this again? Hopefully! Will I talk about a full week's worth of music again? Hopefully not! Until then, stay safe and tie your shoes!