Showing posts with label tiesto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tiesto. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - july 21, 2018 (VIDEO)


Sorry this is late, folks - fell asleep while the damn thing was rendering, whoops. 

Anyway, next is Dirty Projectors, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - july 21, 2018

Okay look, I knew that any cooldown week coming out of an album bomb like Drake's would not be small, if only for the massive shifts within the Hot 100 itself... and then I remembered that both Future and Meek Mill dropped projects that so happened to get some traction within their circles - two projects that I'll freely admit I forgot about because nobody cared to request either of them. And when you factor in the twenty one pilots breakthrough that's likely to get pretty big pretty fast... yeah, this week wound up busier than I thought, go figure.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

video review: 'a town called paradise' by tiësto


Well, glad I got a chance to handle this - only wish it had been better.

Next up is Ab-Soul, so stay tuned!

album review: 'a town called paradise' by tiësto

So here's something you might not know about me: I listen to a lot of trance.

See, there was a brief period for me in around 2009-2010 that I started delving into this melodic brand of EDM, mostly out of a desire to find out was else was in this musical landscape beyond drum & bass, dubstep, and my appreciation for The Chemical Brothers. And with its melodic focus, mid-tempo energy, and sweeping production, I came to like a lot of trance music and listen to a decent bit even today.

So why haven't you seen me review many, if any, trance records? Well, you could put it down to an overloaded schedule and the fact that I still struggle somewhat with reviews of instrumental albums, but the truth of it is that I just drifted away from the genre. A lot of modern trance got more glitchy and staccato and began co-opting elements that took away from the soaring, melody driven trance I tend to like. What's kind of hilarious in hindsight was that even as I was moving away from that particular brand of EDM, the larger genre in general was moving towards the mainstream faster than ever with the success of house DJs, the rise of dubstep, and the general acceptance of EDM on this side of the Atlantic.

So with that in mind, let's talk about Tiesto, who started releasing trance albums in the early 2000s before drifting into darker, electro-house territory, which culminated in his 2010 release Kaleidoscope. The funny thing with that record was that you could see the shift towards a more pop-friendly sound already in the works, with shorter, more conventionally structured songs, and the biggest arsenal of vocal collaborators outside of an Armin van Buuren album. So when I started to see Tiesto songs cropping up on the lower ends of the Billboard Hot 100 chart his year, I wasn't exactly surprised - with EDM becoming more mainstream, it wasn't a surprise that those that would crossover first would be the most accessible to a pop audience, not to mention to a critic who has difficulty reviewing EDM. So on that note alone, I figured I'd give A Town Called Paradise by Tiesto a look - how did it turn out?