Friday, October 2, 2015

Deafheaven, Disclosure, and What a Time to be Alive

As promised, here are a few more of my opinions of recent albums. The projects I'm looking at here are Deafheaven's New Bermuda, Disclosure's Caracal, and the Drake/ Future collaboration, What a Time to be Alive.



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Deafheaven: New Bermuda

I'm honestly just getting into the whole black metal thing, but I can definitely see what Deafheaven does differently from the Mayhems and Emperors of the world. The band definitely borrows a lot of screamo, shoegaze, post rock, and in this project , more trash metal. There's definitely some '80s speed metal in here, and the soaring guitars throw more of a Siamese Dream coloring on the album than a De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas vibe. I can see where people are coming from when they say this isn't black metal. But does it really matter? This album is pretty great, even for all my struggling to parse out lyrics. It's a lot more direct than Sunbather, but it still has its peaks and valleys sonically, and I feel like there's a lot here that fans of many genres may be able to appreciate.


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Disclosure: Caracal

There's not really that much I have to say about this album. I honestly feel like this is the inevitable place that this whole new wave of electronica has taken us to. It's all mid tempo mediocrity with pretty passionless singing about pretty cliche topics. I've seen things saying this is more of a pop record with electronic elements, and I have to agree. The group got some radio play with 'Latch', and unfortunately this is the direction they're going to go. I guess we now have an idea what the UK garage answer to Avicii would sound like. Pretty uninteresting, as it would turn out.


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Drake & Future: What a Time to be Alive

I'm going to cut to the chase; this mixtape is god awful. I've never really been a huge Drake fan, and I really can't stand Future (I made the mistake of reviewing Honest a while back), so maybe this project isn't for me, but this is less than half assing. Future's auto tune warbles are slathered all over this thing, and Drake sounds pretty uninterested for the majority of the project (the exceptions maybe being 'I'm the Plug' and 'Jump Man', though the latter has an atrocious hook). Hooks are incredibly weak, especially the groan fest that is 'Big Rings'. And people are trying to defend this, saying it was recorded in only six days. So? Tupac's Seven Day Theory was written and recorded in one more day and it is orders of magnitude better. Hell, Spiderland and Please Please Me were recorded in two days and 12 hours, respectively. Besides that the instrumentals were most likely sitting in Future's inbox for months. It really is just a compilation of Future scraps that they threw random Drake verses on, for the most part. I wouldn't be surprised if I learned that the two were never in the same room, or state, for this project's recording; they have no chemistry whatsoever. Watch the Throne 2 this is not.

So, check in later for more of my opinions. Do you have any opinions on these albums? Let me know what you think, or what you think I should share my thoughts on next.

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