LogFAQs > #959545449

ZaziGuado posted...

Cloud Cult - Light Chasers
https://open.spotify.com/album/33eVsQZqpFsBNoKu97rJlS?si=xENgnVfqRRqPOo9gRDlMLQ

@ZaziGuado

I have to hand it to the nominators. There's a lot of variety in these albums, and I never know what I'm going to get before listening. Of all of the strange intros I've gotten (which has been like every album), starting with the Major Tom orchestral indie piece was probably the most effective. Really got me excited for the album in a way I doubt any other plausible song would've.

Of course, I didn't like the songs that weren't in that style nearly as much, though I'm more merciful on them than I probably would've been had the first song not put me in a good mood. The album has a pretty archetypical indie pop feel, so right away this was a *risky* pick. I found that the most typical the instrumentation a given song here had, the less I liked it (with the exception of Exploding People, which had the rough handicap of the autotune in the variety I hate the most). I definitely felt my patience wearing thin by song 4 until it started ticking up again.

I think I'll say that this was "Owl City but approaching some value of 'good'". A lot of it was way too happy (or, more [and less] precisely, "happy-feeling") for me, which is just... blech. Blech is the word for those tracks. Others, like Forces of the Unseen, I liked better for not being so peppy and having neat instrumentation choices like the cello. I think I can say I genuinely liked that and a couple others, ~7/10 tier.

One thing I have to mention about this genre in general is that emotionally, it's a complete miss. It's too... straightfoward is the wrong word but it's the best one I'm coming up with. It's... I can't think of how to describe it without sounding condescending. It's too "show > tell". It's too "I am telling you how to feel so this is how you should feel". It's too "look how relateable this is". I want to stress that these aren't any kind of "objective" statements, just observations on what it feels like to me. Cheesiness can be alright, but this goes way too far. In terms of conveying emotions with songs I don't have prior associations with, I *strongly* value more nuanced compositional storytelling, and will generally consider lyrics only after I've already formed a connection, as I think I've mentioned in another writeup somewhere. The Venn diagram of emotional beats between this and, like, Kimera II is the null set. The closest song I can think of that succeeds to me is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCENN-Zm3R0, which is quite obviously pretty different. The album depends pretty strongly on feels, so it has an inherent handicap.

Some individual song notes:

The Exploding People, SOMEHOW, would fit perfectly as a goblin track with just a Ctrl-H of "people" to "goblin".

Call of the Wild was probably my least favorite movie I've ever seen.

Responsible is the specific song that led to my emotions rant, as you may have guessed.

When Dawn started, I 100% thought I somehow was listening to Dead Man's Gun from RDR.

The album was exactly as long as my preparation for dinner, so that was convenient (it finished fading out just as I took the food out of the oven and put it down). I rolled my eyes at a lot of this and wished for a few of the songs to end faster, but I can't say I hated it. Honestly, that might be a bigger accomplishment than Nujabes or Kali Uchis scoring high, since, if you saw my VGM ranking and Johnbobb's average placement, you'll know that any kind of music that can be described as "indie" scoring above "I made it through the song" is remarkable.

Favorite song: Unexplainable Stories
Score: I usually wasn't yearning to mute it/10

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