#okay ramble over back to vibing with gorillaz

[lady-caden]

I feel a special interest coming on....

[tracle0]

WIP Bops Tag

So I got tagged for.... two music/listening related games in the span of two days so I will. Do both in one to save myself idk making another post lmao

First one: I think you just list things you’ve been listening to. Maybe the last ten things you listened to? I don’t know man. Tagged by the wonderful @kaatiba​ thank you boo 

I have been listening to...

Cloud Cult - I stand by the fact that Cloud Cult 500% have the best bops for apparently all my wips. ‘Time Machine Invention’ is peak Leon, don’t try and tell me otherwise. ‘It’s Your Decision’ gives me big Percival vibes. ‘Good Friend’ apparently works for every single WIP I have because I write about friends too much.

Night Vale - I missed Night Vale ok. I’ve listened to it all already, but I wanted to hear the Strexcorp arc again, and the liveshow and Carlos man. Carlos. 

I’ll Follow You Into The Dark - isolated song, but I have been listening to it over and over again, because it’s somehow playing my heart strings rather than a guitar. I am obsessed with this song. I learnt it on the ukuele as soon as I could. Major Mika vibes. Made me realise ‘ohhh he’s Catholic ain’t he’ and also made me figure out his friendship with Lynne more. Thanks, song.

Vienna Teng - someone else mentioned her recently, and I went ‘oh yeah I used to listen to her I should do that again’ the only memory I have of hearing her songs is. Not good. So I’m trying to get other memories down lmao.

I need to listen to...

Jake Parker Plagorised My Book which is a very cheerful subject. Quick run-down; Jake Parker is the creator of the yearly Inktober challenge. He plagorised the book of a black artist. I figured I should understand the Drama and then decide what I’ll do in October if not Inktober. 

Okay that’s like five, good enough. Next tag game;

Rules: Share some songs that have inspired your WIP or characters, then tag some people to play! - tagged by @albatris​ thanks homie and I’ve decided I’m going to jump around between WIPs becuase I want to. 

So first off I feel like the songs that first made me go ‘oh I could make a story out of this’ - DIAS spawned from ‘Hopeless Opus’ by Imagine Dragons. I got the idea for like. Two characters who were seperated for some reason, both regretting something, and went ‘okay! How.’ and my brain spat out Leon and Ant.

Whereas wip4 sort of spawned from both ‘On Melancholy Hill’ by Gorillaz, obviously, and also ‘Light a Roman Candle With Me’ by fun. And I cannot tell you at all why this story spawned from these songs. I think it was mostly... for Melancholy Hill, it gave me isolation vibes, and Roman Candle was more... a desperate reach for connection. wip4 has a focus on friendship. I guess that works? 

DIAS again - ‘The Cave’ by Mumford and Sons is. Peak DIAS, not gonna lie. I have officially storyboarded out an entire animatic that is just the entire plot of DIAS to this song. Every verse sort of follows each act of DIAS and uhh

So make - your sirens song and sing - all you want I will not hear what you have to say

I can’t say why because major spoilers, but that lyric. Fits. Very well. 

I mentioned ‘Time Machine Invention’ by Cloud Cult being a major Leon song, because it is, so I’ll talk about that here; Leon gets blown up at one point, and loses his leg. This, along with the fact he thinks Ant is dead, makes him Very Depressed. Vincent comes along like ‘hey dickhead stop being depressed’ except said in a slightly nicer way, and gives him a vote of confidence he needs to get up and try and fix one of the problems he has, that being the leg. 

If we give this moment our fullest attention, we’ll just keep moving forward, with no need for going back.

Which is honestly, just really good life advice, but is also kinda Leon finally starting to let go of the guilt he has over possibly killing Ant and starting to live life without any new regrets. 

wip4 again because this is getting long but I still have things to talk about; ‘Turn The Lights Off’ by Tally Hall is big It vibes, and I cannot tell you how but it does. I’m delighted to put ‘Holding Onto You’ by Twenty One Pilots as a major Keaton song, for the simple reason that Holding Onto You has tried to be a wip song for EVERY SINGLE wip, but it finally actually fits. Heck,

I’m taking over my body, back in control, no more shotty,  I bet a lot of me was lost,  t’s uncrossed and i’s undotted

is like. The first verse, and is also major Keaton being like ‘WOW WHAT THE HELL I WASLITERALLY DEAD UM WHAT’ and also the entire struggle against It. Fun times. 

‘Hello, My Old Heart’ by The Oh Hello’s is a Big Percival Mood, and I can’t really explain why - extreme protectiveness over himself and trying to save himself??? Maybe. Uhh. I’ll give you an Abby song and then done with wip4 - ‘Icicles’ by The Scary Jokes fits her freakishly well. I just found out the artist is nonbinary, which is cool, but I’ll talk about that another day. 

I can only be forgiven if I'm givin' myself up to you  On a silver serving tray  Must I bare myself to the stabbing of your knife and gnashing teeth  While our lovely company appears so entertained?

I think Abby recognises that she is in the wrong for a lot of the story, but also thinks that admitting this to Percival would sort of... reverse their roles? That he’d want revenge and would inflict the years of pain she’d put him through onto her. He wouldn’t but she doesn’t realise that. So ‘must I bear myself to the stabbing of your knife and gnashing teeth’ is just. What she assumes she’d have to deal with. 

Okay! Final song and it’s for DIAS and also for Simon cause we’re talking about villains okay. He’s got ‘The Greatest Show’ but specifically the cover by Panic! At The Disco. Simon is, to quote the lovely Summayah, ‘a dramatic fuck’ and this song is dramatic as fuck. 

Don't fight it, it's comin' for you, runnin' at ya It's only this moment, don't care what comes after Your fever dream, can't you see it gettin' closer? Just surrender 'cause you feel the feelin' takin' over 

Which is a pretty good way to explain Silvertongue commands and his general attitude to them, don’t you think? 

I’m done now. I have more songs and entire playlists but I’m done, I’ve rambled enough, this is long. I will tag: @joyful-soul-collector @druidx73 @petrolstationflowers @scmalarky @the-starlight-chills and you sir, over there, please, tell me about songs.

[deadcactuswalking]

Gorillaz’ “Plastic Beach”- My Favourite Album of All Time

I tried to write this many times and come up with many reasons why I loved this album, and love it today. But I feel the best way to describe it simply is this: Plastic Beach is the ultimate vibe album. Genre-bending wizards behind their Doncamatics incorporate different energies, emotions and atmospheres into each and every song as if they were different people entirely, and this is just a NOW! That's What I Call Psuedo-Psychedelic Music About Recycling And The Environment LP. Yes, this album does revolve around beaches being polluted and the modern wave (no pun intended) of electrical technology putting nature behind - it was overwhelming in the birth of the digital age in 2010, and the perfect balance between electronics and organic instruments on this beast just spreads that message, even without any of the lyrics. While it does show Damon's soft spot for nature, I think this shows Damon's newfound love for his iPad even more. A lot of the beats sound cheap on this album, but the crispy-clean mixing makes it sound like it was as rich as a bitter dark chocolate bar. Coupled with the orchestral elements thrown into a lot of these tracks, you can tell how this is a mess of an album that even sounds unfinished due to its messy musical palette. But isn't that just furthering the concept?

I might as well talk about the singular tracks, starting with Sinfonia Viva's beautiful orchestral intro, that sets the tone for the funky and jazzy horns backing Snoop Dogg's slick rhymes in "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach". Damon's monotone vocoded vocals show that even with the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble being the main instrumentalists on the song, electronics are still present, showing an even starker contrast in the relaxing intro of "White Flag" from The National Orchestra for Arabic Music, that laters becomes aggressive and intense in its many synth loops that assist Bashy and Kano's energetic bar-trading, leading into "Rhinestone Eyes", a catchy electronic rock banger with unstructured verses and an almost disastrous breakdown, as well as nonsensical tongue-in-cheek lyrics, but they all fit into a theme - throughout the whole album, the lyrics are silly but they always reference colours like blue and purple, as well as the contrasts between the sea and its radioactivity (from "Superfast Jellyfish"), for lack of a better metaphor. In its essence, the sillier lyrics on this thing make you mistake it for a Beck album. "Stylo" is a funky 80s electro-funk jam featuring Bobby Womack's soulful and downright majestic vocals, slowly rising like the breath of a dragon as he roars through the repetitive roads of nonsense that sprews from Damon's mouth in his verses about giant fish and electric love, book-ended by Mos Def's quickfire spitting.

After "Superfast Jellyfish", featuring De La Soul being hilarious, we have the second masterpiece (after "Rhinestone Eyes") of the album, "Empire Ants", with one of the most elegant twinkly string-synth leads I've heard, over a shuffling disco beat and Damon's beautiful harmonies, as it slowly builds up to a synth-melody that makes it sound like an entirely different song, one with soaring guitars and a wobbling bassline, but the disco aesthetic and bittersweet lyrics from Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano are still present, and even more powerful over the fun but intense synthpop track. That leads us to Mark E. Smith's guest spot on "Glitter Freeze", where he rambles a bunch of nonsense prior to some morse code and stomping drum beats under a crazy distorted synth lead, that just dips your toes into some instrumental insanity. It sounds ugly but of course it does, it's a confusing mess. He's lost. "Where's north from here?" Mark cries as he tries to find his way through modern life. Then, peace is found. Lou Reed does his classic talk-croon over the chilled and steady pop-rock stylings of "Some Kind of Nature", which is some kind of fantastic and also some kind of utter nonsense, as Lou continues to mention mayonnaise being eaten by the needy in their phony clothes, and his fondness for plastic and digital foils that could wrap up the sun and protect "the girls" from spiritual poisons... ...What?

We've already experienced soaring heights and soaring lows - we've found the calm before the storm and then the storm turned into a hurricane that wrapped us up and left us in the center of erupting volcano. The amount of emotion presented in the first nine tracks is such a range that at this point, the only emotion we haven't been capable of achieving is the opposite of the phoniness that Lou scoffed at - simple heartfelt love. "On Melancholy Hill" is a new wave ballad that encaptures the feeling of love perfectly, in its drug metaphors that somehow still feel fresh and envigorating in Damon's autotuned sorrows over the sunny synths and some cute synths that makes us feel like we've gone off the deep end so much that we just feel numb, looking out on the day of another dream. But it's a good numb, it's a numb that feels like as if we're travelling through hell but not feeling the consequences. We're exceeding the limit of known obliviousness and plain joy that when we were at "Rhinestone Eyes", we couldn't feel at all. And we would never feel it again... right?

But then we hear the clashing of the bell interrupt her travels. Our string is broken. Silence. Those five seconds where we only hear the bell's echoing impact mean so much to the album, mostly because they take us to "Broken", with a melodica melody that drifts us away to the distant stars Damon describes. It's at this point that we notice that true love was never felt, what was being felt was assurance and just being content with the status of the earth. The "love" that bonds humans and the world was broken, and Damon croons about the status quo that has been shattered, mentioning that his sanity is far away in the ship of the "Glitter Freeze". Where's north from here? There is no north, there is no way upwards from this rut. So we pretend to feel okay. We drink to forget, we drink to connect to the world. We might gamble, we might deal or take drugs, we might do whatever that gets us into a place in our lives where we can feel like we're not numb, but what we're really doing is increasing our numbness to all the madness that happens before our very eyes. "Sweepstakes!" You're a winner, and you won your honorary fake smile. Our fake high lasts what feels like ages but really is just a fast blip in our lives that develops into horns and orchestras of imposterous delight. "Aim high, why not?" Mos Def says as he cheers you on. What could go wrong?

Maybe... everything has gone wrong and you can't feel it anymore. As your high fades away, the guitar chords and the distorted static noise leads you back to the album proper, and not the trip that occurs through the middle that breaks the concept down and smashes the status quo as if it were a like button. Once again, the sweet contrast of the natural twinkly synths and strings in the title track, "Plastic Beach", and its cheap, ugly synth lead emphasises Damon's confusion, which brings me to the best lyric on the album: "It's a Casio on a plastic beach."

Damon's pitch-shifted chanting grants him a realisation and conclusion - it's the "green, green dough" that's all that matters. Thanks to this, although the next few tracks may feel sweeter, they're just soured by this one lyric. The psychedelic surf-rock guitar and vocal melodies in the beginning of "To Binge", once again featuring Nagano with her beautiful verse that meshes into the instrumental as if she is really digging deep into alcoholism, which is what the song is about. Damon and Nagano aren't drunk, no, they're just looking back at the bitter tastes in their mouths with a sweet facade as Nagano pictures the coloured animals on the floor and walls. The world is by Damon's side, but he's not feeling it despite his love for the planet. At this last string of the album, we hear some more of the most meaningful lyrics in the course of the album that really shapes up our concept: "My heart is an economy due to this autonomy."

The waves are crashing down, and a storm's a-brewing. The best title for a song on this album is definitely "Cloud of Unknowing", because that should have been the album title as it is a perfect description of the album, and even uses the semantic field of weather, climate and nature that the album uses throughout, but still presents that confusion. Sinfonia Viva's strings are played over field recordings of a  beach and all of its sound effects, as we hear one of Bobby Womack's last recordings prior to his death. And damn, does he sound better than ever, with a soulful performance that brings a tear or two to my eye. As the orchestral instrumental develops and advances into more powerful violin sections, Bobby just continues to sink and wait, predicting that maybe there'll be a chance of sun. Maybe there won't. Who knows? Not his sinking love for the planet, as all it has done is bring him pain. If his love was electric in "Stylo", it's at this point that the plug is pulled. And we end the album, despite all the beautiful and elegant ballads that we deal with for the last leg of the LP, with some fun bombastic trumpets in my favourite song on the album, "Pirate Jet", where Damon retrospectively looks back on his thoughts and just kind of dismisses them. It's all good news now, we don't care! Let's just embrace our own carelessness and fade away in the sands of time with the purple, the people, the plastic-eating people. On the cloud of unknowing, your world isn't as open as you may have thought.

Rest in peace to Bobby Womack, Mark E. Smith and Lou Reed, who each contributed greatly to my favourite album of all time.