These Nights Are Ours

  Heaven Will Be Mine OST by Alec Lambert   I read an article a few years ago about the death and rebirth of music.  It described how music as we know it must die in order for it to truly move forward.  While I no longer remember where I read that from, the concepts of it have stayed with me for several years.   Heaven Will be Mine has deconstructed and destroyed electronic music as we know it, giving birth to a new take on an old genre.  For music to truly grow and expand we need more music that follows this logic, and Alec Lambert certainly has embraced this concept with this soundtrack. Within the runtime of Heaven Will be Mine the concepts of intentional distortion are embraced, and driven to the absolute extreme.  Stripping the album to its core shows the remnants of  house techno.  However, restricting it to something so simple would be a great injustice. Heaven Will be Mine takes noise and weaves it into the very fabric of every note...

  OCCASUS by THE AMENTA   Much has been made of the inhumanity of war.  Death is now dispensed automatically by droids that know not fear nor remorse.  An unstoppable force that will not yield until its programming has finished: every last living being has been eradicated. If Occasus is a weapon then The Amenta are its inventor.  I have yet to hear another album that comes as close as Occasus does to being truly brutal… cold… murderous. The music has but one goal, to eliminate anything and anyone standing in its path. The compositions contained within this album are difficult to place into a singular genre of extreme metal.  There are touches of death metal, black metal, and industrial metal.  They are mixed together so well that they form a musical alloy, impossible to separate once combined, no longer able to take on their initial forms.   The riffing is exact and mechanical, nearly devoid of all life and melody.  The drums are processed ...

Where by Streymoyer   Where to begin with an album like this? There are so many concepts explored and so many stylistic changes that the sheer length and scope of the album make it challenging to finish in one sitting. The album begins in truly excellent fashion.  The first five tracks especially are extremely well crafted cinematic dreampunk compositions.  They are dynamic, never overly complex, and they take their time to build into a beautiful haze filled mood.  They all flow into one another, giving the sense that they are individual components of an album rather than just isolated songs. After those first five tracks though, the quality begins to dip.  The next two songs go from bad to worse, with Anything Anymore being just abysmal.  There are droning vocals present over a repeating melody that doesn't progress anywhere.  I like to take albums in as a whole, as the artist intended the listener to.  As such I hardly ever skip tracks, but th...

  Body Dares by Halo Acid   I’m usually of the thought that just because you are doing something unique doesn't make it good.  There are a ton of examples of this where artists puts ideas together clash.  As a result the music sounds disjointed and often unlistenable.   Halo Acid is the exact opposite.  He has merged glitch, noise, 2-step, and ambient into a style dubbed Ghost Tech.  Body Dares represents one of his last releases under the Halo Acid name. It also represents some of the harshest music he has created under the moniker as well. Quite a statement given how distorted and twisted some of the Halo Acid back catalog is.  The music has this frantic but yet subtle percussion that is marred in distortion and glitches, with melodies providing a serene contrast.  The lead instrumentals are often drenched in reverb, giving the music a near ethereal atmosphere.  It's two opposing forces that shouldn't work together, yet somehow t...

    Grid Failure by CRYOSAUNA Notes Black Ice - Man where do you even start with this album?  The first time I heard it I had to stop it because I knew I wasn’t appreciating it for what it was, I was expecting 2-step and what I got was nothing like it.  Everything that Cryo has done to this point has been some variation of upbeat tempos or ambient, nothing ever this dark or this slow… it took me quite a bit of time to just disconnect from what I thought Cryosauna was and recalibrate to what Cryosauna is. And what he is on this release is the next step in his evolution.  What he has done here is take his style and warp it into something so dark and twisted that it is a grotesque reflection of what it used to be; in the very best way possible.   Black Ice starts off the album in a very similar way that a dark ambient album would start out: brooding.  And this brooding feeling really never leaves throughout the rest of the album, it just hangs over yo...

     “I hope this album represents another side to Dreampunk. It doesn’t have to be just pretty bright lights and phaser soft-synths. It has the ability to be soul-crushingly dark as well.” - Cryosauna , June 2021 Dreampunk is dead, long live dreampunk.  The death of a genre is not something to be taken lightly.  If it is not able to expand beyond the bounds set at its inception then it will stagnate and ultimately become futile.  So when one of the most promising young artists to come out of the dreampunk scene changes styles drastically, I take notice.   Grid Failure represents the antithesis of dreampunk as it stands.  Where there was once warmth there is now frigid cold.  Complex interlaced layers that lull the listener to sleep? No more!  A wall of sound that envelops the listener in its bliss? It has been discarded for a stripped down minimalist atmosphere, offering nothing but the barest of structures and the harshest of sounds...

    Transient Thoughts is a series of shorter reviews that capture my thoughts on a given album at a given time.  Most of these reviews have not had nearly as in depth of a look at my full reviews.  These thoughts are often formulated while walking through my neighborhood, and reflect how the album impacted me in those moments.  I hope you enjoy them. Higher Art Of Rebellion by Agathodaimon Agathodaimon's debut album Blacken the Angel came into the black metal scene in the mid to late 90's and really made an impression on me.  They had an excellent mix of keyboards and riffs that stood out from much of the other bands at the time.  The album was rough but it had a ton of potential, and I eagerly awaited the follow up. So what happens when you take that potential and strip away everything that made it interesting?  You get an overlong album that has some truly excellent moments that are mired by a slog of uninteresting material.  That i...

  Transient Thoughts is a series of shorter reviews that capture my thoughts on a given album at a given time.  Most of these reviews have not had nearly as in depth of a look at my full reviews.  These thoughts are often formulated while walking through my neighborhood, and reflect how the album impacted me in those moments.  I hope you enjoy them. 私に返す by S O A R E R   It's strange what can occur when you take the songwriting principles of one genre and apply them to another.  Slushwave is known for long, drawn out compositions that take minutes to fully form their melodies and grooves, if they are there at all.  So when Soarer took those same principles and applied them to dreampunk a fascinating album was born. The album is deceptively simple.  At any given moment there is at most a beat, lead instrumentals, and backing synth pads. All this is then put through a phaser to give the combination a hypnotic sway. None of this is new. In fact...

Transient Thoughts is a series of shorter reviews that capture my thoughts on a given album at a given time.  Most of these reviews have not had nearly as in depth of a look at my full reviews.  These thoughts are often formulated while walking through my neighborhood, and reflect how the album impacted me in those moments.  I hope you enjoy them. SACRIFICE by ll nøthing ll   Where am I? Is this hell? Is this heaven? What is this place? What are these strange sounds that threaten to tear me limb from limb? What is even real anymore? All these questions and more are likely to pass through a listener's mind while listening to Sacrifice.  When I first heard it, I wasn’t sure if the album was a total waste of my time or the work of a mad genius.  I listened to it baffled, not knowing what I had just experienced.  The only thing I knew was that I had to listen again… and again. The music truly sounds otherworldly, like nothing I have ever heard before...

  Transient Thoughts is a series of shorter reviews that capture my thoughts on a given album at a given time.  Most of these reviews have not had nearly as in depth of a look at my full reviews.  These thoughts are often formulated while walking through my neighborhood, and reflect how the album impacted me in those moments.  I hope you enjoy them. Virtual Dreams by Skyrealm Have you ever felt as if you are on a journey through a foreign country, simply taking in the sites? Surrounded by people but cannot communicate with any of them.  Everyone is content to live their own lives and you are in this transitory state, just passing through.   This is the feeling I get from Skyrealm’s Virtual Dreams.  Through the use of field recordings I am taken into the streets of Japan and allowed to get a small glimpse of different parts of the country.  Each track acts as a scene to the larger picture contained within the album.  Each its own stop al...

  Transient Thoughts is a series of shorter reviews that capture my thoughts on a given album at a given time.  Most of these reviews have not had nearly as in depth of a look at my full reviews.  These thoughts are often formulated while walking through my neighborhood, and reflect how the album impacted me in those moments.  I hope you enjoy them. ENCODYA (original soundtrack) by Yann Latour It's truly fascinating what happens when someone stumbles upon a genre they know nothing about.  When Yann Latour created the soundtrack to Encodya, he did not know what dreampunk was.  Even so he created a worthwhile entry into the genre. Encodya embraces both the visual and audio stylings of dreampunk.  The cover looks like it could have come from any of the major artists in the scene, and the music is undoubtedly influenced greatly by Blade Runner.  Without knowing that this was a game soundtrack beforehand I would have put this squarely into the d...

  Transient Thoughts is a series of shorter reviews that capture my thoughts on a given album at a given time.  Most of these reviews have not had nearly as in depth of a look at my full reviews.  These thoughts are often formulated while walking through my neighborhood, and reflect how the album impacted me in those moments.  I hope you enjoy them. The Quiet Respite by Jabbu I’m walking down a sidewalk with anxiety welling up inside of me.  It’s my last day of vacation and I’m starting to feel the pressure of work beginning to weasel into my consciousness.  While I'm walking I start playing Jabbu's the Quiet Respite. There is something remarkable about this album.  It senses the anxiety within me and works its way to displace it with peace.  This album is not merely music, it is a tool for reflective meditation to combat the stress of life. Jabbu combines principles of lofi hip hop and ambient to create an album that is somewhere in betwee...

  Dive Reflex Service 01 by Dive Reflex Service    Transient Thoughts is a series of shorter reviews that capture my thoughts on a given album at a given time.  Most of these reviews have not had nearly as in depth of a look at my full reviews.  These thoughts are often formulated while walking through my neighborhood, and reflect how the album impacted me in those moments.  I hope you enjoy them. I came across this album by pure chance. I was browsing one of my friends' recent Bandcamp purchases and the cover stood out to me. At first I didn’t know what it was. Was this some strange ambient album?  Some lofi hip hop? Whatever I thought this album was, I was not prepared for what I got. Dive Reflex Service music takes what I presume are samples from every walk of life and stitches them together in a way that absolutely has no right to work. Let alone work as well as it does here.  Each song acts as a sort of gateway - a peek into another wor...

EVE • LOTUS-001 by Gates of Siam   Transient Thoughts is a series of shorter reviews that capture my thoughts on a given album at a given time.  Most of these reviews have not had nearly as in depth of a look at my full reviews.  These thoughts are often formulated while walking through my neighborhood, and reflect how the album impacted me in those moments.  I hope you enjoy them. When this album first released I dismissed it as something that I could not get into.  I’m not entirely sure why I thought that, because upon revisiting it I found myself listening to one of the strongest albums of the year.   Eve does what few albums can do, it enraptures the listener in its sonic tapestry and doesn't let go from beginning to end.  Very seldom do I listen to an album that captures my attention, imagination, and ultimately adoration like Eve has. The way that the tracks are composed leads the listener down these paths and trails that are akin to little ...