military / war music again. call of duty strings. putting you in that kind of mindset.
the beat is stiff yet light and agile. springy. a cyborg about to fight a regular human. circling your opponent daring them to make a move.
aggressive but sounds like he’s having fun with it. muhammad ali’s exaggerated facial expressions.
can’t really take this one seriously.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=girlfriend voice
i see crowley made the comparison to metal.
goes from impish to genuinely pretty at the chorus, to crowley’s point about it being more musical than metal though. especially the “hmmm”.
interesting that the beat doesn’t really mirror his antics. it’s pretty standard, or at least restrained, which makes the vocals performance better and more surreal. it’s like watching the news on tv and hallucinating that the anchor turned into a demon. if it were filled with spookiness signifiers it might sound like midwest horrorcore. (i.e. not good.) going “all out” would actually make it less special, not more.
almost reminds me of dizzee sometimes in terms of emotional timbre.
his voice rising in pitch like that makes no sense, in that it’s not referencing anything about how voices normally work. a new kind of inflection. transhuman.
a different future voice introduced at 1:50. flatter, grayer, but in a futuristic way. cybotron without the 80s corniness.
a lot of bleeps in this. proving that sound world isn’t just the territory of europeans being weirdos.
again, if the music matched the vocals (specifically the lyrics here) it wouldn’t work as well. unsettlingly cheery, celebratory for a song about killing people.
funny how the most intimidating music is almost never the heaviest, most abrasive music.
like which seems more badass, that or this lmao:
flood of information at 0:25. in all of the more recent ones, and in all recent rap, you get this peripheral margin world of sounds moving alongside the foregrounded elements. i’m not sure how important it is but its definitely where a lot of weirdness sneaks in. subliminal messages.
nice change in the vocals around 1:50. a change in color.
the main voice sounds like a sun god.
this is basically just trap right? obviously its more of a dancehall beat but the similarity really hit me here. same hyperreal shininess, which even the vocals have.
approaching 2010s AE levels of reverb. when there’s this much reverb i don’t here it as simulating a space so much as an independent sound to be interpreted. to me it sounds like mist.
really like all the vocal edits in all these. the goblin voices at 0:18 are a great example of peripheral weirdness. so is the faintly wailing ghost at 0:58.
things don’t need to sound old to convey traces of the supernatural, they can sound ultra modern. if it’s haunted it’s not in a dracula way but in a nightmare at 20,000 feet way.
in this one the background becomes the foreground. kartel’s voice sounds unusually thin, muffled. contained or imprisoned rather than in command. so your attention is drawn to the reverb and constant movement around it.
triumphant but obviously not in a chariots of fire type way.
another not-quite-worldly voice. strong, boisterous yet almost swooning at times, echoing out into space. a god taking the form of some guy in the bar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0TgRy5kh_o&list=PLUauGzUG35p47MZ9Hjn1lkS87lpLa_cIw&index=19
opens with backwards sounds. backwards has certain spiritual connotations of course.
theres a pretty but almost a sickly quality to this. glowing green light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjb0YxC8dSE&list=PLUauGzUG35p47MZ9Hjn1lkS87lpLa_cIw&index=20
more flirting with metal aesthetics with the cover.
sounds different from the other two alkaline songs i’ve heard. same attention to pitch, but more stoic, almost. like he upgraded cybernetic implants to become more emotionally stable.