Pastel – Cabo Player
Genre: Electronica
I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but there was a time, not long ago when any second of music that got onto a record had to be played by a human being. If nobody could play it, it didn’t get recorded.
This wouldn’t have been so bad only for the fact that the people who possessed the most amount of skill on an instrument chose to use their abilities to play jazz, classical and other non-danceable forms of chin rubbing tunes.
DJs fund ways to create musical collages that include the kind of ideas that pro-musicians rarely even dreamed of. DJs gave any dance groups a run for their money. And, at their best, they could, and still are, able to make dance music that sounds both ethereal and highly dynamic.
Pastel’s “Cabo Player” sounds like dance music being played out in a dream. It’s a beautifully produced record, sure. But just like classic punk rock, it also has one single hook, and it hits the listener over the head with every chase that it gets. Yeah, the machines can take over the world, but they’ll need some very smart people to get them to do anything of real importance.
Taylor Curtis – The Stranger
Similar artists: Radiohead, The Strokes, Muse, Arctic Monkeys, Queens of the Stone Age
Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
Tension. That’s the thing that makes for great art, and the reason why your Netflix movies are bland, rockstars are boring nowadays, and few people even bother cracking open a book. They all lack in tension, in mystery, in the things that make you want to ask questions of yourself and of the world.
That’s not say that all of those art pieces don’t have other things going for them. Many are well constructed. Most know exactly to what kind of audience they are pitching their material. And, most of the people involved have gone to enough schools of art to understand how they can mash various influences together.
Taylor Curtis’ “The Stranger” is an amalgamation of all the rock bands that have gained mainstream popularity over the past couple of decades. They’re not a lot, of course, and putting their sounds together might not mean much. But Curtis uses this guitar-first alt-rock to create a moody, strange world of suspicion and lies. It’s a would-be spy movie soundtrack and one that welcomes tension as an old friend.