on the pulse - 2020 - week 48 - weird death vacation

This is going to be a long week - it’s already felt like one given half the catch-up and a certain artist giving me way too much to say on short notice; spoiler alert, it looks like it could happen again next week, fun stuff! Either way, strap in, let’s get On The Pulse!

Shawn Mendes - Wonder - So I already reviewed the album at length - many people say it’s one of the most ‘positive negative reviews’ I’ve ever made, but to boil it down: it’s a scattershot, underwhelming, frequently frustrating failure, but it’s the first time Shawn Mendes has made the sort of daring artistic pivot that makes me want to hear where he’s going next. In other words, 4/10, but I still recommend you hear it because it’s bonkers and deserves at least a bit more scrutiny.

The Chats - High Risk Behaviour - Have to be honest, folks, if I wasn’t being completely mercenary by including this group given their surprising popularity, I’d have vetoed them, because this debut album gives me very little to say. Basically imagine a cross between The Ramones and Descendents, with a lot of snotty, mischievous Aussie energy and a tight rhythm section compensating for any sort of depth or the fact that they’re a pretty flagrant throwback to a specific tone and sound in garage-leaning punk rock that flirts a bit with hardcore and can drop a few fun solos. Now to be fair, that sort of careening, wired energy designed to be loose, dirty, disposable, lowest common denominator fun until the consequences hit you in the nuts is the point, where getting an STI or Ross River disease, getting your identity stolen, getting denied from a club because you have a mullet, getting heatstroke, they’re a grimy but likely unfortunate reality you just have to power through. It’s stupid goofball shit, and on that standard, it’s at least fun and bouncy… at least until they try to be sarcastic on a school shooting song with an admittedly killer groove titled ‘The Kids Need Guns’ and it just feels too basic to land its attempted point. It’s more pointed on ‘Billy Backwash’s Day’ taking the piss out of eshay culture for being a bigoted faux gangster, and I think the material that’s more distinctively Australian sticks out a bit better and gives The Chats a bit more distinct personality… but on the flipside, it’s not like they can’t be just as belligerent across this project even in its broad clumsy pull for equality, and it doesn’t solve how derivative the project still feels overall. Overall… it’s a fine listen, but outside of the Aussie flavour, I’ve heard a lot of this done many times before, and while this is a good version of it, I wouldn’t call it exceptional. solid 6/10, it’s basic but likable, so check it out.

Fury - The Grand Prize - Well, this is certainly some thrash-leaning heavy metal alright. Honestly, to some extent I could stop there, but let me elaborate further: Fury is an independent UK act that’s been active throughout the 2010s and is very indebted to a specific brand of early 80s heavy metal in content and sound, from the production to the slightly husky frontman to being very heavy on the wild guitar solos. Now I’m not against this - I like Spirit Adrift and they’re all about retro-Sabbath worship - but from the start Fury wasn’t really transcending their influences, and coupled with utterly bloated albums and not stellar hooks or mixing, I had the impression I’d been down this road many times before. Now I will say this album is a bit slower, which might imply a little more melodic development so I had hope this would turn out fine… but it doesn’t disguise how despite solid prominent lead melodies and a frontman with a promising voice, the cymbals are buried, the bass grooves have inconsistent presence, the hooks are just okay, and there’s very little texture across the entire mix - this a band that desperately needs a producer to lend it some texture or unique punch, because otherwise the mix can feel weirdly barren, closer to demo quality. And it’s not like the writing is super distinctive either - a few space references on ‘Galactic Rock’ and ‘Casino Soleil’, the spiraling out of control on ‘Burnout’ that ties into what seems like an extremely loose race throughline, and ‘Upon The Lonesome Tide’ is a legit solid power ballad for this band - but the majority of it is hard rock posturing and pump up material we’ve heard hundreds if not thousands of times before in rock and metal. It just doesn’t stand out of the pack for me, and the cracks in quality do show through, so strong 5/10

Kaatayra - Toda historia pela frente - so we’re going to stay in metal for a bit and hey, here’s the other Kaatayra album released in 2020! Now this one is structured and plays a fair bit different to their first: it’s more openly energetic and metal-focused, where especially in the lead work off the cacophonous drumwork Kaatayra really shines. But it also feels tougher to digest in its three tracks, one seventeen minutes, one eleven, and one that runs a solid twenty-six minutes with multiple distinct movements crossing between atmospheric black metal, burbling prog-leaning passages, and fast-picked acoustic folk, and there’s less of the frenetic blur that made the last project feel so organic and seamless. The content does seem to lie in similar territory, though - a similar desire for meditative tranquility amidst the primal forces of nature and the tides of time washing away earthly concerns, a push for inner peace and comfort amidst the absurdities of life, following an older path... but also an acknowledgement that it won’t be a path everyone can take in the modern era, a wisdom that’ll only truly return in the cycle of history with societal collapse and a return to equality and harmony with nature, outside of false hierarchies and illusions of peace. So I won’t deny the content leads to a greater feel of immediacy… but the presentation is even more challenging and meandering, and that does mean that while this is still very good, I’m not sure it’s as great as the first project earlier this year. Ergo… strong 7/10, very solid, thought-provoking folk-infused black metal that is worth a listen, but it might be a tough one.

Liminal Shroud - Through The False Narrows - And to round out our metal selection, this is the debut album of a Canadian black metal act from out west, and… well, this is stuff that definitely leans closer to jagged death and doom metal textures that the soaring black metal I normally gravitate towards. Yeah, the roiling blast beats are there with some noticeably thick kickdrums and overall a solid command of atmosphere, but the vocals and lead work is more snarled and guttural, less shredded screams and closer to death growls. But even taking that into consideration, the inconsistent texture and presence of the bass grooves and how the band will ignore transitions for jerkier compositions means that this wound up falling more flat for me than I would have liked after repeated listens, especially as the lyrics behold the wild, storm-crossed savagery of the sea and nature and sink into increasingly bleak melancholy at the inevitability of our own descent and death as a result. Tack on your standard anti-religion subtext and it winds up a pretty dour listen as a whole, and considering it runs near to an hour, it wasn’t one that had me excited to return that often, even if I can say that it keeps itself pretty melodically distinct and dynamic. I guess if I were to find things I like they came in some of the slower, atmospheric passages with some nice guitar-driven simmer, and I dug the snarled melodies on ‘The Grotto’ especially how they moved into the rain-soaked piano outro, but overall I just get the feeling that this just isn’t really my thing instead of being bad, especially given the very real talent displayed in some tightly knit compositions. So… strong 6/10, again, just not really for me, but I did want to like this more.

Monolake - Archaeopteryx - hey look, another one of those electronic acts with a hefty back catalog where it can feel a bit like homework going through it, this time with ambient techno and IDM, with a decent amount of field records integrated into the mix to flesh out the fragments of tune. And as someone who is not into techno much at all, I was surprised going through Monolake’s back catalog how much I liked it! I think it has to deal with the field recordings providing that very subtle melodic foundation and organic texture for the glittery blips of percussion to play against, where it’ll still feel mechanical and cool, but it’ll preserve that texture and atmosphere. Which unfortunately is more of a trait of their earliest work in comparison with their critically acclaimed mid-2000s period where it seems like the focus was more on sound design than composition - which you’d expect from the mastermind of it being one of the creators of Ableton - but hey, I still generally liked it. I will say I’m not sure I liked it enough for over an hour and a half of it on the newest album Archaeopteryx, which unfortunately goes back to leaning on the chillier blips and burbling touches with the sort of pristine crispness that might make for great material to test the dynamic range of your stereo system, but not exactly engaging listening. Yeah, the bloated runtime is absolutely an issue, but you could almost justify it given the breadth of sounds on display: ambient whirs, percussion spanning minimalist techno to more textured and progressive rhythms to even trap passages, and synths from the slightest of twinkling burbles to Hans Zimmer-esque low blasts, all delivered with an impeccable fullness of tone and almost discomforting texture, especially on the more fractured, metallic experiments. I’d argue the album really hits its stride around ‘Ircks Argle’ with its guttural growls and trap-adjacent percussion, and continues even past the cymbal and bells experiment of ‘Plateaux Orthogonal’… but the problem is that this is midway through the album and there’s not much in the way of sequencing or momentum to build into those moments, with increasingly tuneless bloat on both ends. If I were to highlight my favourite moments, they’d probably come with the jagged synths and vocal samples of ‘Espace Fourier’, the sad beeping ambience of ‘Orbit Incomplete’, and the blasts of ‘Sinc Response’, but they’re not rising to the best of Hongkong or Silence, on a project that probably works better in pieces than as a whole. 6/10, certainly an intriguing listen, but a bit of an exhausting one too, wish it came together more firmly.

Ashton Irwin - Superbloom - For those of you who don’t follow me on Instagram - @SpectrumPulse, I share wholesome content for the family, you want the nasty stuff go follow me on TikTok - you might be surprised when I say I’m excited to cover this album. I mean, a solo joint from a member of 5 Seconds Of Summer, especially given their work in recent years, why would I care? Well, this wound up a fair bit more interesting than I expected, because while it’s a flagrant throwback, it’s to a specific era of early 90s alternative rock that seems to have gone overlooked by all the retro fetishism I’ve seen recently for that decade. Specifically it reminds me a lot of the odd transition moment between the softening of grunge and the smoother explosion of Britpop around 1994, where you can hear the cross-section between Oasis and Soundgarden wrapped with an often surprisingly visceral style of writing that feels defiantly Australian. Now before fans of these eras lose their minds with excitement at the revival of these sounds, I will say that Superbloom absolutely feels caught in the middle between these sounds and winds up a little compromised, especially as outside of the lyrics, he’s not giving up the pop polish - you’re not getting the huge, pummeling riffs that came from the best of grunge and even then, Irwin is a singer who is a little too clean and polished, no matter how many reverbed overdubs pile in - he’s no Eddie Vedder or Noel Gallagher, even as he tries to be. I also wonder how much of the microtonal flirtations on the final few songs were inspired by King Gizzard - not complaining about it at all, but couple with weird sequencing, Superbloom absolutely takes some weird turns! Now that being said, I can’t always see the lyrics clicking as strongly - Irwin frames much of the album as cutting into his internal demons and angst, from body dysmorphia, a sense of isolation from friends and family triggered by fame only further intensified by current times, and his own worries that his previous pop work with 5SOS wasn’t authentic to his own more complicated impulses - not unfamiliar territory for a pop rock artist going in darker territory, but I do think Irwin is credible in selling a lot of it, although ‘Greyhound’ is by far the most visceral and satisfying song here. Overall, what I like about this album is its promise - a little basic, a little derivative, absolutely transitional for him as a solo act, but one that promises one hell of a wallop with a bit more of a chance down the line. Easily the best thing anyone attached to 5SOS has released since at least 2015, though, so… very light 7/10, it’s interesting and worth hearing, at least in my books.

Rico Nasty - Nightmare Vacation - I’m a little annoyed with myself that it took this long for me to get to Rico Nasty, so I wanted to ensure I did this right: I went through her initial run of mixtapes throughout the 2010s that I could find, up and including her breakthrough Nasty in 2018 and the Kenny Beats collaboration in 2019, and my thoughts are a little complicated. Rico Nasty likes to careen from auto-tuned pop trap crooning to more in-your-face snapping against slightly sweeter melodies… or at least she did before Nasty, where she switched more consistently into guttural, hard-hitting, minimalistic trap bangers that were solid, but maybe didn’t show the same dimensionality.beyond slamming you in the face. And here’s the thing: Nightmare Vacation does show off a lot of Rico Nasty’s versatility as a performer in terms of intensity and vocal inflection and the fact she will just command a mix, howling or autotuned against gleaming hyperpop production… but man, I wish there was more to this than sheer vocal stylism. For one, as varied of a performer as she is, the content can start feeling impressively one-note in terms of flexing, shopping, and if she’s not fucking her targets, she’s smacking the shit out of them, and when that’s your one mode for over a dozen tracks, even if they are shorter nuggets they don’t quite have the same distinctive punch. If this is her debut album, you’d think there’s be a little more versatility to show she could make the crossover record, but outside of Amine it seems like any guy who hops on a track with her is a little terrified - or Gucci Mane just being as boring as ever - or when a woman gets on she embraces the exact same shrieking presence and style. It almost seems like she’s relying on the production to lend the mixes a bit more colour… and while it’s generally good, it can feel like a bit of a mixed bag, a lot of minimalist trap bangers with jagged, off-kilter melodies with few super strong melodies or hooks that Rico Nasty is not carrying. I did find myself surprised how well she contrasts with Don Toliver on ‘Don’t Like Me’, ‘IPHONE’ is a hyperpop banger with some fat midrange blasts that I thought were pretty damn potent, ‘Let It Out’ shows how much she’s a natural fit opposite 100 gecs production - although ‘OHFR’ kind of tested my patience - and I even kind of dug the hook she had with Trippie Redd on ‘Loser’! But I also did like how she flipped the woodwinds on ‘No Debate', and she can absolutely handle an old-school scratching flip on ‘Pussy Poppin’, and Kenny Beats delivered for ‘Smack A Bitch’ - but outside of that the album doesn’t feel as consistent as her past two. So 7/10 - still pretty damn good, will absolutely play better to a different target audience than me, but still recommended all the same.

grandson - death of an optimist - …believe it or not, I really don’t like calling an act a rip-off or derivative; I like finding the uniqueness in an artist and it at least makes them more easy for me to follow or categorize. So when I come here and say, ‘grandson sounds like twenty one pilots but edgier, with more guitars, trap percussion, considerably more political, but weirdly less original or refined’, I’m making that statement with the knowledge I just pissed off a lot of people. But it’s really damn hard to avoid that impression when listening to this album feels like the worst sort of burned out doomscrolling, framed as a fight between grandson’s ‘idealistic’ or ‘optimistic’ impulses and a rampant onslaught of nihilism… but one where he ensured nihilism stacked the deck because that will sell to irony-pilled Gen Z kids way better than ‘hope and change’, let alone any real activism or systemic change. Indeed, on the first half of the project that’s trying to be optimistic, the political allusions are vague, skeptical, cliched, and half-baked at best - he doesn’t want to move on from where he is, but he thinks he wants to lead, but most importantly he doesn’t want to be left behind, and while that might be representative of a lot of privileged people new to activism, I’m not sure what that adds if your subtext is ‘well, can we really fix anything’. So I guess credit for knowing his target audience, but I immediately have way less patience for any veneer of self-awareness he slathers onto the more nihilistic and considerably less tolerable back half of the album - there’s a song called ‘We Did It!’ where he tries to get coy around how the last election really will not cause huge change because people only did the ‘bare minimum’… and not only does it feel excruciatingly ignorant to the current climate - especially voters who were actively disenfranchised - and doesn’t acknowledge how systemic change takes long-term work, but it ignores how incremental change can matter to a lot of people, especially those who are marginalized by bad systems, which grandson here certainly doesn’t seem to be. Unfortunately growing up in the 2000s I’m way too familiar with this brand of nihilistic “punk social commentary” that has allusions to WW3 by people who read headlines and nothing else because they don’t understand or don’t have to care about how this impacts other people’s lives - I thought it was basic and worthless in 2006, and even moreso in 2020, especially after the past year of uprisings, why would I respect someone who’s either trying to appropriate it with no nuance or crap all over it? You’d think by the end he’d pull out of the tailspin, and on the surface with ‘Drop Dead’ he tries to emphasize 'well, we kept on surviving, have to keep going, I’d rather drop dead than quit’… but his perpetually nasal and burned out delivery only emphasizes how low the stakes are for him if that’s the most he can muster. And more importantly, why would I care when the production on the back half of the album turns to absolute crap, adopting what I’m going to call the ‘Muse-Drones’ approach of approaching a downbeat political album by washing out the mix in desaturated compression and fuzz that leeches out any instrumental colour and turns the album completely sterile - at least when twenty-one pilots went dark on Trench, they had the heaviness and sense of scale this album can’t come close to approaching; yeah, that attempt at blending the drum machines with the bass tells me all I need to know there, this album feels shockingly underweight. Worse still it manufactures the heavier feeling this album is ‘deeper’ than it is and when it feels this unbelievably cynical and detached, especially in 2020 it’s the last thing I want to hear - maybe it was assuming that the election would go a different way, but that’s the deadly risk of trying to be topical and only specific in tone, not content. But outside of bad politics… yeah, when your instrumentation is this colourless, clumsily produced, and derivative and as a lyricist and frontman I’m not otherwise impressed, I’m not recommending this. It says something that ‘Dirty’ might wind up as the best song here, and it’s a poor man’s ‘Feel It Still’ with a trap drop. So strong 3/10 - I really did not like this at all, maybe it’ll play better to a younger, more disaffected audience, but given how dated it already feels, I kind of doubt it.

YUNGBLUD - weird! - …so remember all the shit that Ava Max got with ‘Sweet But Psycho’ for its painfully basic take on framing anything as ‘psycho’? Okay, so take that, multiply it by painfully dated mid-2000s pop rock mashed up with modern trap and a British ‘rapper’ who commits more than he should to the questionable gimmick straight out of the worst of pop emo, but has nowhere close to the edge, intensity, colour, or intelligence to make it interesting or anything close to good. Yeah, in a better world YUNGBLUD’s 21st Century Liability would have had this guy dead on arrival… but then the trap-infused rap rock revival kicked into gear and YUNGBLUD collaborated with MGK in a saving throw of shrewd dumbassery, so we now have weird!. And… this is one of those sophomore projects that’s an improvement because the textures are becoming popular again and YUNGBLUD realized he could play into his pop sensibilities for a lot of easy hooks. Now make no mistake, this album is stupid, cliched, and derivative beyond nature - the most YUNGBLUD brings to a pretty archetypal pop punk sound is a smattering of British glam punk, a few trap passages, and crossdressing… and honestly, maybe that’s enough to make this tolerable, if more than a little simple-minded. It works in a similar way that Tickets To My Downfall did, more on flash and swagger and solid hooks than brains or nuance, but I’ve already praised The Chats for a lot of the same thing, even if weird! stumbles into being more stylish by accident. That said, there are two major problems that hold this back, the first being that as much YUNGBLUD’s first album was in horrible taste, the writing was a little more distinctive than this album, which doesn’t have the same sense of detail or flair to match the frontman. The second major problem is the production - yes, the compositions got more catchy and the hooks on average are better, but let’s not act like The Chats or hell, even MGK don’t have better grooves or texture in their mix - hell, on their collab ‘acting like that’ MGK brings along Travis Barker on drums and production it’s by far the most punchy and convincing stab at pop punk YUNGBLUD can assemble. Hell, you could argue with Zakk Cervini behind the production boards that like MGK that YUNGBLUD is a frontman benefiting from studio veterans to add a veneer of competence he couldn’t assemble on his own. But you also need to have the instincts to act on those opportunities, and YUNGBLUD proved he could at least be competent here… providing you could get into his creaking, squawking voice that strains at all the wrong moments, and yet by the end of this, I mostly did. So… 6/10, I know there’s a part of me that’s being generous on this dude, but I also can’t deny I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, so take that as you will.