Forum Member Album Reviews

[YorkeDaddy]

Psychephilia - As Seen From...Space

1. Explain This Nonsense
Right off the bat I can tell you that you have a lot of work to do with your mixing and equalizing. Making your music really loud is one thing...maxing out people's speakers and damaging someone's hearing if they're not ready for it is another. I kind of knew this was coming based on sampling some of your other stuff so I had my laptop's volume set to 25/100 and it was still quite loud. The dark gray here on my volume shouldn't be topped out for the entirety of the song:



Anyway moving onto the actual content of the album. The first half of this track is some pretty standard noisey experimentation, but the second half starts to introduce some very interesting and beautiful elements that I'm really loving. Some seriously nice stuff there, lots of cool details to pick apart deep within the mix.

2. Taking Over the World
Very shrill and abrasive sounds here. Still way, way too loud. If I had my headphones anywhere near 50 or above I would be legitimately damaging my hearing. Not much really changed and I don't find these kinds of sounds interesting or engaging so I didn't enjoy this track.

3. Slowly Arriving
Not a lot going on here at first either. Naming it "slowly arriving" kind of helps with the feel of it, I can certainly tell what you're going for with this album with the whole space alien type thing. Some more interesting spacey sounds start to come in. Nice atmosphere to this part of the track. Feels like it's foreshadowing something dark and scary.

4. Lumber and Tightening
Some more spooky noises. I wish more of the album utilized the pretty noises behind the noisey mix like in the first track. Give me more of that and we'd have an album I love, but at this point we just have an album I kinda enjoy but would only really come back for the first track.

5. Jazz Hands
Great start but then we just get some wobbling synth. Oh here it's coming back around the one and a half minute mark. There's even some sampled vocals going on. This track is neat but doesn't seem to really fit in with the context of the album at all. I feel like you could've saved this track for another album where it fit more cohesively. Clearly this track was influenced a bit by some of Mondo's work, and you've done a good job at emulating that style. I'd like to hear more of this but can't help feeling a little weird at how out of place it is.

Verdict: There's flashes of really great stuff but also a lot of really cookie cutter experimentation where you're mostly just fiddling with effects on a basic synth and calling it a day, which is a style that works for some but isn't particularly engaging for me. Despite that I'm still looking forward to reviewing your next album, and you definitely have potential to make something great. Maybe you already have and I just haven't heard it yet, maybe it's the album I'm reviewing next. We'll just have to see.