Showing posts with label the neighborhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the neighborhood. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

trailing edge - episode 004 - march 2018 (VIDEO)


So I understand there might be a bit of controversy surrounding a few of these reviews... look folks, it happens, just roll with it.

Anyway, I'm hoping to drop a review along with Billboard BREAKDOWN tonight, so stay tuned!

Monday, November 11, 2013

video review: 'i love you' by the neighbourhood


Ugh, this was a disappointment. Glad to finally get this one out of my system.

Next will probably be a few more retrospectives, as I need a bit more time to get through MIA's discography. Now that'll be a review that'll get some people agitated...

album review: 'i love you' by the neighborhood (RETRO REVIEW)

A few weeks ago, the video game series Extra Credits made an episode about a growing problem in film and video games: spectacle creep. To boil the principle down, this is a belief that blockbuster movies and games have to keep becoming more and more extravagant and 'epic' with each installment in order to keep the audience's interest, and that after a certain point, you'll hit a brick wall because there's only so much you can ramp up the 'epicness' before it just starts getting ridiculous. 

The sad thing is that I don't think the Extra Credits guys went far enough with their hypothesis, because I'm here to tell you that some of this same concept is true in music as well, particularly pop music in the past few years. Most of the credit/blame for this can be placed at the feet of the rising EDM scene, where elements seeking to drive the strongest emotional reaction must be a continuous crescendo - you find this in some dubstep fans always hunting for the biggest 'drop'. It's the rise of raw grandiose spectacle over substance, which is why this year there have been so many songs with heavy backbeats and pounding percussion that utterly eclipse the lead singer or the rest of the instrumentation or the lyrical content (Katy Perry's 'Roar' springs to mind). Now let me state of 'course' this isn't the case for everyone - several acts this year managed to make those heavier beats work for them in a pop context, mostly by adopting a larger scale or a more invigorated sound in their delivery - but let's face facts, that requires an artist with distinctive personality, and we don't always get those.

So, producers and songwriters who were desperate to leap on the bandwagon figured out the next best thing to get songs to sound more potent and meaningful than they really were: reverb, letting individual sounds build and echo in the mix to create that sonorous experience. But there can be problems with that approach, and to discuss these problems, we're going to talk about the debut album from The Neighborhood that came out earlier this year to my complete indifference. This album is a classic example of how trying to make their music sound bigger and more impressive only highlights the serious weaknesses of the act and ultimately renders their album a lot worse that it otherwise would have been branded. Oh, don't get me wrong, the album is pretty damn mediocre all the same, but the poor production choices pushes this album towards bad in a big way.