video review: 'oh, yuck' by so much light

Look, sometimes you have to call a spade a spade, and this guy might just not be my thing. Eh, it happens.

Next up, Billboard BREAKDOWN and something I probably should have covered two months ago... stay tuned!

album review: 'oh, yuck' by so much light

So I'm sure at this point many of you have seen a certain piece of bad writing at The Atlantic making the rounds with a particularly ugly clickbait title called 'Progressive Rock Is The Whitest Music Ever'. And yeah, the article lives down to the title, the sort of piece that reflects an uncanny lack of knowledge surrounding the genre and really a general disinterest in writing about it altogether. But aside from an easy opportunity to bag on awful music journalism, the article did get me thinking why people dislike the genre, because there are some points in calling out prog for its pretentiousness wankery, its underweight concept record with bloated orchestration, and complexity for its own sake.

Here's my point: there is a genre of music where this sort of thing bothers me... and progressive rock and metal is not really that genre. No, it's the more obscure and for me much more frustrating genre of math rock, known for complex time signatures and rigidly over-designed melodic and rhythm sections. And with less of a focus on lyricism, you can bet that I'm not really a fan - but it's also a relatively obscure subgenre and people don't tend to request it...

Until today, which takes us to So Much Light, a Sacramento-based project for Damien Verrett where on first listen you could definitely see traces of math rock in the complex, shifting time signatures and knotted melodies of his debut Supine/Spellbound in 2012. But the overall genre of the music proved to be tougher to follow: anchored almost entirely in acoustic guitar and with a pretty impressive backing list of musicians to flesh out the sound, it'd be easier to slot this towards acoustic-leaning indie rock... and then you get our frontman with a remarkably timid and thin vocal delivery and lyrics that would not be far removed from the weirder side of emo. So I'll be blunt and say I wasn't crazy about that debut at all - a couple fascinating arrangements, but little else that gripped me... but we would not see another full-length So Much Light record for another five years - an EP in 2015 and a few scattered singles, but then he signed to ANTI- and we now have a follow-up called Oh, Yuck. So okay, how did it turn out?