video review: 'oil of every pearl's un-insides' by SOPHIE

Yeah, I kind of expected the backlash here... eh, it happens.

Next up, Billboard BREAKDOWN and then 5 Seconds Of Summer, so stay tuned!

album review: 'oil of every pearl's un-insides' by SOPHIE

So I tend to find it interesting what people's threshold for 'weird' is in electronica, mostly because I'm fairly certain mine is pretty skewed. Most of this I can attribute to when I started getting into electronic music in the first place a couple of years back, which found me delving into the critically acclaimed experimental electronic music that seriously challenged the art form rather than the foundational artists in house, techno, and other associated subgenres, most of which I found later. But what this means is that it set a strange baseline for what I would consider 'challenging' electronica, one that's probably not common with anybody else.

So for an easy example, let's talk about SOPHIE - known to work with Charli XCX and the PC Music group with chipper, burbling synths, lumpy, overblown and distorted progressions, and a sensibility somewhere between late 90s bubblegum pop and k-pop for synthesizing maddeningly catchy music, I had been aware of SOPHIE going back at least as far as her 2015 project Product, but I hadn't been thrown off-guard as so many were. Yeah, the mixes could feel slapdash and unbalanced, and the frequented pitched-up vocals could grate on my nerves, but beyond that... well, she at least had a pop sensibility in comparison to a producer like Arca, but that gave me the impression that this was considered so mindblowing and genre-pushing only with respect to modern electro-pop. And yeah, while it felt undercooked lyrically and I wasn't remotely convinced this was that experimental, I enjoyed it for what it was, and as such I wasn't nearly as surprised when she notched credits on Vince Staples' newest project, or that she'd have a larger release following up on the compilation Product waiting in the wings that's getting the bandwagon critical acclaim. So did SOPHIE manage to live up to all of those expectations with Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides?