on the pulse - 2020 - week 41 - sign of the anime agenda

I’m not going to claim this week was difficult, because honestly I was ready to put this together ahead of schedule and I covered more albums with bigger back catalogs. But I get the feeling this might wind up contentious, so we will have to see how all of this turns out. So with that, let’s get On The Pulse!

The Ocean - Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic - I don’t feel like mincing words about this - this is the sort of progressive metal that I have limited success with - leaning heavier on guttural hardcore vocals and nothing close to a hook in sludgy, meandering compositions, with content that tries to split the difference between high concept framing devices and more “grounded” raw lyrics that don’t quite hit the sweet spot for either, all on albums that run frustratingly long. Again, I’m not going to say this is precisely bad - it’s generally literate and it absolutely has an audience and will get critical acclaim on thematic density alone, but I’m left thinking about the lesson Mastodon learned circling around this territory that so much prog hasn’t: tunefulness and accessibility don’t have to be dirty words, because in going through this back catalog, I found way too much that ran together. Now I will say their 2010s work was more tuneful and better structured and thus stuck a little better, so I may have had some hopes for this… but by the time I was finished with this, I was left with the lingering feeling that The Ocean missed a real opportunity here. For those who don’t know, the title of the album and every song are a reference to ancient eras of history, with the first album from 2018 looking to focus on the natural occurrence of cycles of life that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago, with this album bumping up to the Triassic period onwards to now, and it’s intentionally designed to feel a little more scattered and unpredictable in comparison with the more streamlined natural cycles. A few observations: one, this is an album that features the period encompassing the dinosaurs and the most they’re utilized is as an a tragic example as an apex predator wiped away by said natural cycles, which strikes me as a bit of a misuse of dinosaurs over two songs in comparison with eras that don’t have that dramatic potential - yes I was a dinosaur kid growing up, how can you tell - and two, that’s some dramatic lustre this album could have used opposite some pretty colourless and depressingly rote-feeling sludgy progressive metal that’s about the furthest thing from unpredictable. Yeah, overall it’s got a little more melody and is a bit catchier, but if you’re taking a bird’s eye view of epic historical eras, and you don’t add unique texture beyond some callback riffs and lyrical repetitions, I can argue you’re not making the best use of your subject matter. It also feels bizarre to reassert the cyclical nature of mass extinctions and a return to detachment given how humanity is currently driving the next one, which you’d think would make for an obvious point of commentary, but this album focuses its metaphor more on living through apocalyptic cycles and again, I feel like you’re not making the most out of your high concept here! But the larger problem is that even going past thematic questions, the music feels really underwhelming - yeah, it’s well-mixed with solid wiry grooves and I don’t think any of the synth work or drum passages or guitar lines sound bad - hell, I’d argue the rollicking guitar passages and some of the creeping basslines are probably the nicest parts here - but especially alongside vocals I don’t think are that distinctive or potent, there’s nothing exceptional or truly interesting texturally or tonally here. Overall, though… with albums this high concept you either need to hit some sort of abstract, quintessential truth or really connect to the human element, and while I can see this satisfying a target audience, I just feel distant from it. light 6/10, and that feels generous

Nova Miller - The Passion EP - So Nova Miller is one of those upcoming pop acts who could be a real presence if she had good promotion and the right machine behind her - I covered one of her singles on my IGTV series - @SpectrumPulse, beat the rush - and I thought she had promise, so I was curious how this EP would grab folks’ attention. And while I get why labels like to lead off with the EP to drive singles traction, especially for a pop act, listening to Nova Miller gives me the impression that a little more time might have been needed to refine her own unique sound - and given that she’s been dropping singles since 2015, that’s a problem. What blows my mind isn’t just that her songs with obvious samples and interpolations are the most striking, like that of ‘California Dreamin’ on ‘Do It To Myself’ and ‘Disturbia’ on ‘Mi Amor’ - kind of like your lead-off hit being a cover - but that her sound feels very much stuck in the middle-of-the-road pop from between 2015-17 especially in its retro touches with more than a few glances at Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman, and as much as I think she’s a really good singer with a lot of expressiveness and range, nothing in her production is forward-thinking; it sounds expensive and overall better-than-average, you can tell someone threw a lot of money behind this, but will that grab people beyond an audience looking for a very niche era of pop that got overtaken by trap incredibly quickly? This is where you desperately hope the content does something different… and it doesn’t - again, this is where you want to differentiate yourself and I’m not sure Nova Miller does. Dancefloor hookups, troubled breakup angst, a song where she tells the guy who now wants her back to cry about it and I’m not sure the magnanimous vibe connects… but again, not a lot that defines a unique Nova Miller song, even if I think she can sell what she’s been given. Overall I’d argue this is solid and reflects the potential I’ve heard before, but sheer talent without distinctive artistic identity will only take you so far, so… strong 6/10, I want to hear more, but she and her team have work to do.

Dorian Electra - My Agenda - I’m not sure how to feel about Dorian Electra. I feel like I’m a bit late to the party given that I only heard Flamboyant this year and I reviewed one of their lead-off singles on Instagram for this while utterly mangling their pronouns - big apologies there, by the way - and the feel I have around their music is similar to that with Charli XCX’s analogous brand of hyperpop - splashy, technicolor, blown out, soaked in autotune, and occasionally not as catchy as you’d hope as they spend the album playing and subverting any sense of a gender binary. And it looked like My Agenda was continuing down the same path with even more guest stars and an even tighter runtime… and let me say this now: it’s a mess, but Dorian Electra’s music has always been messy so the question is whether their sound can transcend it, and especially in comparison with Flamboyant, I’m not sure it does. Granted, this is all coming from someone who is generally onboard with their consistent and damn near single-minded subversion of straight masculine and specifically incel archetypes, which is the sort of transgressive edge that’ll be a more challenging swallow for the vast majority of audiences. But that exposes a bit of a problem with Electra’s work: once you’re comfortable with the abrasive, blown-out blur of synth and guitar tones and what I can only describe as a genderfuck experience, what else is here beyond the flash and stylism, especially as so many of these pieces feel like undercooked fragments? Well, the immediate retort to this is, ‘does it need to be anything more’, and of course the answer to that is no… but I wish more of these ideas took their transgression beyond the first bit of in-your-face-provocation, especially when the tunes and actual compositions are so contorted and fractured and rarely build up a powerful groove. It might be an obvious stylistic choice to suffocate the vocals and mix in warping pitch-shifting and metal-adjacent bro-step, but I can’t help but think it subsumes every guest star into the morass, and it starts to feel like their inclusions were poorly chosen gimmickry rather than complimenting the song - bringing the Village People and Pussy Riot onto the title track is a prime example, as is getting Rebecca Black on ‘Edgelord’. Now there are moments where the mix lets some splashy synth work get to the front to drive a stickier hook, or when the song gets so ridiculously aggro that it can click - ‘Ram It Down’ winds up as the best of both worlds and then following it with the closer ‘Give Great Thanks’ with massive sub energy - but if I’m looking for pop-friendly wild subversions of masculinity, I think I’ll stick with Kirin J. Callinan. very light 6/10, I really hope to see growth on the next project.

Spirit Adrift - Enlightened In Eternity - So I’ll admit I’m still a bit surprised at how much I loved Spirit Adrift’s album Divided By Darkness last year, because it’s normally the sort of metal I call pretty solid and move on - obviously retro-looking with a ton of Black Sabbath worship, really only elevated by being way more tuneful and well-produced than the dime-a-dozen acts who have chased this path over the past forty years. But that’s normally what gets me in the door - to keep me here you’ve got to do a bit more on your follow-up… and wow, it sure is a Spirit Adrift album alright. Same well-balanced heaviness with a focus on brighter melodic hooks, same obvious 70s metal worship including lyrics that definitely feel like they’re touching cliched power metal territory. It feels a bit brighter overall in terms of its grooves in comparison with the last one - a bit reminiscent of how Ghost’s sound shifted in the guitars between Meliora and Prequelle, if nowhere else - but I’m also not hearing the sort of standout that ‘Angel & Abyss’ was, so I’m stuck looking for what’s different or a real improvement. And… well, the solos are pretty great as a whole, but I think where Enlightened by Eternity slips a bit might be in dynamics, where the rock solid balance consistency could have afforded another pivot or two beyond the driving groove and great lead work of ‘Cosmic Conquest’, or leaning towards thrash on ‘Harmony of the Spheres' - hell, you don’t even get the killer synth diversion that was so cool on Divided By Darkness, just a bassy, doom-adjacent slowdown with some organ by the end here… yes, by the final two minutes it ramps up for a solo, but it feels a bit late for it. I do want to highlight ‘Battle High’ as another highlight as a pretty well structured anti-war song subverting how training conditions soldiers to find euphoria in combat, but that’s about the only lyrical moment that stood out, which was a little disappointing as well. Overall… look, I still think Spirit Adrift has a ton of promise, but from what I can tell from their interviews they’re a band that has fun stepping outside of their comfort zone, and I’d like to see them do it more, because I think they’d probably stick the landing. 7/10, wanted this to be a little better, I’m confident they’ll get there.

Autechre - SIGN - I’ve been flat-out told by some of my Patrons that they request music to fill in gaps in my musical knowledge, so I can ‘do my homework’ as it is - and I’m not sure how to take that, given that for every extensive and fascinating back catalog that’s educational that I find, there are just as many formless and forgettable avalanches of interchangeable blandness overpraised by history and time. Which takes us to Autechre, where to their credit I’d argue there’s more of the experimental, oddly textured but a distinctly organic flavour to their shambling glitch and odd ambient passages which shows for even when you have electronic music generated by procedural code, said code still has to be written by someone. This has led to one of the more difficult back catalogs I’ve explored in electronic music, but it’s one that’s left me with a lot of stuff I’ve liked or at the very least respected a great deal - Tri Repetae, the fascinating glitch of Garbage, especially their procedurally generated weirdness of EP7 and Confield, even some of the spiky tunefulness of Oversteps. Now for full disclosure, their bloated experiments in the 2010s I had less luck with - most of us don’t have a solid eight hours to listen to a four-part saga - and thankfully SIGN is a return to slightly more accessible album structures, so where does this measure up? Well, it’s certainly prettier and slightly more structured, at least by Autechre standards - more ambient melody is allowed to hang and shimmer in the mix as gauzy synths and fragments of glitch hang in the air, there’s even fragments of a rhythm that coalesce on a couple of songs, nothing outright accessible but certainly more approachable. What’s interesting is that I can hear parallels to other acts who have likely been influenced by Autechre and have similar deconstructed textures, like Oneohtrix Point Never and Objekt, and I think SIGN hits a middle ground between them in that it’s not as glisteningly organic nor chilly and obtrusive. But here’s the thing: Autechre albums always have a tendency to 'just do their own thing’, to whir and glitch and burble and splash synths about, and thus especially on recent albums it can be a bit of a crapshoot where it connects for me, which is kind of true about the patchy experience here - and when you consider on a textural level more acts are building on what Autechre pioneered to make more composed songs, even the more composed moments here can seem a little slapdash, not quite adding to more. Certainly playful, but it’s not always letting me play with it. Still, it’s Autechre, so I do like this… but I wouldn’t put it among their best for me: 7/10, very good, not great.

beabadoobee - Fake It Flowers - So this is going to inevitably sound bad: beabadoobee is the definition of an artist who gets more attention and acclaim because she fell into mainstream crossover rather than how she might stack up against the sound of her peers. That’s not saying she’s bad by any means - the generally glittery, well-produced dreamy bedroom pop she’s making is certainly likable, but as someone who has heard dozens of acts like this over the past ten years who have projects that are more interesting, beabadoobee doesn’t really captivate me; even putting aside my general aversion to more twee music, it’s not like Phoebe Bridgers didn’t put out Punisher this year, and that’s not even an album I love! But okay, beabadoobee has been riding some decent buzz and I thought her last two EPs were pleasant enough, but now we’ve got the full album and… wow, someone decided the late 90s-early 2000s nostalgia wave was appealing and has jumped on it full speed. So yeah, if you were expecting the dreamy sound I just described, Fake It Flowers is decidedly more upbeat and clear, splitting the difference between the Soccer Mommy album from this year and 2000s Hilary Duff in a way I did not expect! And I won’t deny it surprised me… but I did spend the final months last year praising Tegan & Sara for hopping on a similar sound and this could hit a pretty well-placed slice of nostalgia for me… so why am I still just lukewarm on this thing? Honestly, it’s the same thing that can throw me about a lot of retro throwbacks in any genre - when you realize that beabadoobee doesn’t really have the volume or rawness in her voice to match the noisier, ramshackle guitars around her - though her try on ‘Charlie Brown’ wasn’t bad - the grooves aren’t impressive, and the hooks don’t seem to be above average, it’s hard for me to hear more than nostalgic novelty, which is a similar critique I had for Soccer Mommy. Yeah, some of the reference points are more modern but it’s absolutely grounded in the same sort of messy implications towards real emotionality that are only rarely allowed to explode - there’s a sense of intentional deflection in a lot of beabadoobee’s writing that is very 90s, and while I get its appeal, eventually I have to hope something lands and not much does outside of a pretty sweet love song to her boyfriend in the back half. But to some extent, my disconnect from this might be a generational gap from Gen Z, because I often hit this with the more detached material out of alt-rock in the 90s too, so to hear it here doesn’t surprise me. Ergo, winds up being fine enough, but leaves me wishing it stuck more deeply. 6/10

Homeboy Sandman - Don’t Feed The Monster - We’re now heading into the part of this episode that are ‘projects I’ve been looking forward to from the second I heard about them, and where apparently in the final quarter of 2020 we’re going to get all the stellar hip-hop we’ve been starved of in the majority of this year’. And this one was a doozy - Homeboy Sandman put out the brilliantly underwritten Dusty late last year, and he was now going to be on a project produced by Quelle Chris, who’ll likely wind up on my year-end list for 2020 for Innocent Country 2, aka one of the few brilliant rap albums I’ve heard this year? This was the sort of matchup that was utterly thrilling for all the possibilities, one of my most anticipated all year… and it’s a bit of a swerve, notably going darker and a little less immediately likable than Dusty was. And I want to get the conspiracy theory crap out of the way first - I said when I reviewed Dusty that I didn’t buy Homeboy Sandman thought the moon landing was fake because ‘Wondering Why’ was more about the questions being asked, and I think that’s true here too with ‘Extinction’ and the line ‘if you believe in slavery and in the holocaust but not conspiracy, that’s cognitive dissonance’; I’d like to say here he’s trying to have people open their minds to embracing broader truths - which is pretty consistent across both albums’ themes - but man, framing belief in conspiracy theories in parallel with real world trauma is reckless and begging to be misinterpreted - that’s one of those communication misfires that Dusty pretty much foretold. But that’s also the feel of the album as a whole and has been true about Homeboy Sandman’s artistry for years now, but provocation and oversharing becomes the uncomfortable default this time, especially as his wordplay feels more direct and blunt as he plows into what he views as uncharted ground to disrupt and challenge systems and conventionality, more as the receiver to the increasingly dark and strange world that shapes him than as a creator himself… and not always for the best as I don’t think there’s the same diversity to his flows and his curt delivery can feel kind of forced in spots. Granted, with Quelle Chris lending him slower, more textured clanking production, it’s a delivery that fits the shambling edges, but honestly, this might be some of the most melodic and supple grooves Quelle Chris has ever produced - still distinctly his in how the bassy tunes will bend or contort in slightly kooky directions and feel on the verge of fracturing into lo-fi dust, but it compliments Homeboy Sandman amazingly well. But going back to the content, he doesn’t deny his autonomy so much as set up his principled nature to buck against the roots of his vices - even as both sides can feed into his art, which leads to a real balancing act where he has to keep plowing forward without compromise, no matter how ugly it might turn out to be; ironically, there’s as much metatext here as on the last album, but this time hitting more raw territory. And to his credit, he does show consequences on how this uncompromising approach to self-care splashes into his personal life on cuts like ‘Alone Again’, and that combined with his usual deft sense of humor keeps the experience from getting punishingly bleak or unlikable. But to tie it together… I can see this album being tougher to like and it doesn’t grab me in the same way Dusty did, and it doesn’t help that it dropped the same day as an album with a somewhat parallel arc that is markedly sharper, but I think it’s worth mentioning that albums this meta do tend to work for me, and at the very least the production and nuggets of flair keep this on the cusp of greatness… so strong 7/10. Very good, not quite great, man, I wish I loved this more.

Open Mike Eagle - Anime, Trauma, and Divorce - …at this point, I don’t need to tell you about my expectations for Open Mike Eagle, or the fact that he was probably among my favourite rappers of the 2010s in terms of creative wordplay, flow, weird production, and especially content. So in the build-up to this project, hearing that it was not only likely his most straightforward album in terms of its subject matter, but it would be one of his most emotionally charged as he tries to process the worst year of his life, I had a feeling this was going to hit me and hit me HARD. And as such… oh god, this is a trip. Like Homeboy Sandman, it’s considerably more raw and blunt and it doesn’t shy away from the uglier emotions and feelings of its lead artist, but if Homeboy Sandman is trying to trudge the balance with consequences ready to collapse around him for it, Open Mike Eagle is looking to capture the self-destructive, careening nightmare of everything falling apart in midstream, where you know deep down it’s not true that the Black Mirror episode ruins your marriage and that it’s a proxy for far deeper points of trauma, but you’re almost so caught in that moment that it could have well been the last gunshot to set off the avalanche. And I thought Open Mike Eagle was great at creating tension before, but this feels like the apotheosis of everything he’s previously built in the past six years. From Dark Comedy it’s got the ‘laugh until I start crying and then can’t stop’ humor and deeply felt loneliness, from Hella Personal Film Festival it drills into the offkilter, little human emotions and unerring flaws that show such keen grasp of character but also real vulnerability, and from Brick Body Kids Still Daydream he takes impeccable command of organically textured atmosphere and the ability to place on a knife’s edge of tension before devastating you - seriously, the dread cultivated in ‘The Edge Of New Clothes’ is incredible. Incidentally, it’s a plainspoken and direct album, but far from an easy one - it’s mid-fuckup and it’s going to take you on that ride, and Open Mike Eagle frames himself as relatable, but not completely sympathetic as the recent divorcee trying to put his life back together. Funnily enough the album has plenty of anime references but they’re more to shade the drama of the album, in finding different types of hero to identify rather the giants of the neighbourhood from Brick Body Kids… and where that might have been aspirational, this feels, in a strange way, more achievable, especially in the smaller moments he tries to preserve with his son, and he’s all too aware of hoping he doesn’t continue a deadbeat cycle. And not only does that up the stakes, it seems to force Open Mike Eagle to drill into the work of healing and therapy and contextualizing trauma and where in the times when everything went wrong, sometimes it just doesn’t come together, which made ‘Everything Ends Last Year’ such a heartbreaking song. I should also mention the production - it’s more spare and subtle than Open Mike Eagle has probably had since Dark Comedy, but more melodic and less overtly glitchy - sombre tunes playing around skittering percussion, the occasional heavier song that only seems to emphasize the emotional awkwardness of the song without compromising it; it arguably takes more of a backseat, but the hooks are still great and the content is the clear focus, and for another win, both Video Dave and Kari Faux kill their guest appearances. I do question ending the album with a live cut, but it absolutely fits the persistent expectation of fatherhood throughout the album - even if he doesn’t have to be brave given he can barely swim, he’s going to get in the water and help save his son, and then need for both of them to be saved in his own way; even if I don’t love the song, it absolutely works as a closer. And as a whole… look, I’m gonna quote one of the most poignant lines on the album, written a year ago but just as relevant… ‘it’s October, and I’m tired’ - and this is one of the best projects of 2020, without a doubt. 9/10, deserving of all the acclaim.