Transcription
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Wonky Angle, where I talk about electronic music, both new and old. And today, I'm talking about the new album from Spunk Shine, "A Memory of Something Vast and Elemental."
You know, I was starting to think I'd run out of new things to say about Spunk Shine. I have covered the work of this downtempo producer regularly for several years. I've reviewed every single one of his studio albums since "The Way to the Ship" in 2016. But for those of you who haven't seen any of my previous videos on him, I'll do a quick recap of my thoughts.
It took me several years for me to even pin down how I felt about his material, or what to make of any of his stuff, aside from his typically fantastically ridiculous song and album titles. Although the titles on this new one feel pretty tame by his usual standards, but I digress. With each video, I felt like I was being thrown for a loop on how I was supposed to digest his stuff. His sound is very all over the place. He'll do uptempo and funky big beat type tracks. He'll do moody ambient cuts. He'll do stuff that can be quirky and silly and not take itself seriously. But he'll also do stuff that's a lot more downbeat and atmospheric. And he'll cover any territory in between.
The actual quality of his music is just as varied as his sound. Some of it is really attention-grabbing and fun. And some of it is surprisingly emotionally resonant. And it's a surprising amount of it isn't actually that interesting. But as much of a rollercoaster as his catalog has taken me on over the years, once you get to listen to his stuff as regularly as I have, you do really start to notice a lot more of a formula underpinning all of his work. An easily recognizable signature sound that he's pretty firmly stuck to since he started way back in 2005. You'll notice a lot of similar synth tones and musical elements, a lot of similar structures and ideas, either genre-wise or just musically, from his tendency to build tracks around fairly simple major key chord progressions. In a lot of ways, he's more or less been making the same album over and over all this time. But what's kept that formula fresh is the fact that which size of his sound he focuses on and which ones actually turn out to be executed well will always be up in the air.
And once all that had settled in my mind, I've just treated him the same way that I treat artists like Plaid, in that even if I already know what everything is generally going to sound like on any given upcoming album, I'll always be curious to see what particular strengths and weaknesses the next one has. At this point, I had a feeling that he was going to end up becoming more of a fixture of my "Some Stuff I Missed" segments, as a result, probably better suited to shorter form discussions like that, since I don't need to reorient myself with every release. Now I know exactly what I'm getting into every time. And I was planning on making this a segment in the next "Some Stuff I Missed" as well, just as I did for his last album, "A Superposition of Limitless States." But, as you can obviously tell, this latest album here, "A Memory of Something Vast and Elemental," ended up being covered in a proper video anyway. And it's not because this album really revealed anything new to me about Spunk Shine that I didn't already know sonically. It's an all the exact same territory you'd expect. But it's just that I think this may very well be his strongest album to date. Yes, for real. Over 17 years of making music and 14 studio albums, I think this newest one might just be the best of them all.
Because like with each new Spunk Shine album at this point, I always figure I'll be getting like a fairly lengthy mixed bag of tracks, some of which will really hit for me and some of which I won't feel strongly about one way or the other. This album is notable, first of all, for being his shortest overall, only 10 tracks at just under an hour, and I believe his only project to not break an hour since his debut. But also, like, I kept waiting for some track to come up that I was going to feel less interested by. Each passing track, I kept going like, "Well, this one's really good," and "This one's really good," and "This one's really good." "I'll get a more mid one eventually." And that more mid track never came. Every single track on this thing was really good. None of it felt out of place or even weighed the overall pacing down. I legit couldn't believe it.
And, you know, sure, there are other albums in his catalog that probably have higher highs. Like, for instance, the moody opening three-track stretch of "The Most Distant Machine" is still pretty unmatched in his catalog. But absolutely none of his other albums are this consistent. Even what I think was my previous favorite album of his, "Huge Humans," that one's also pretty damn consistent, but it's a lot longer and more overstuffed. This one has a leg up by being tighter, as well as being much better produced. That's another thing. It feels like Spunk Shine's actual production and mastering game stepped up in the last couple of years. All these sounds are really well-balanced and full-sounding and don't have the thinness of some of his earlier material. I don't know what to say. This album just made me very happy to listen to. May as well go through individual tracks then, shall we?
The album starts out in pretty standard territory with "Virtue Is Mostly Boring," starting out with some low-key electric piano chords and plunking bass stabs, slowly building up into bright and sunny piano chords and breakbeats, a few trumpets and low-mix guitar solos, and existential samples wondering, "Why am I doing this?" going over light and blocky synth chord or arpeggios that are his usual trademarks. I may have heard plenty of Spunk Shine tracks over the years that sound almost exactly like this, but it's still just so mood-brightening and satisfying with perfectly paced buildups and payoffs. This is the perfect way to open up an album like this and still the kind of thing that could only ever be recognizable as his style.
That sunny and light-hearted and quirky vibe is kept up and even improved upon by the following track, "The Smell of Gravity." Featuring all these blaring synth stabs that half resemble tubas going up next to all these punchy breakbeats, funky guitar loops, and fuzzed-out horn licks, maybe even a chopped-up sax solo. It's just so much damn fun. I don't know if it's possible to listen to these first two tracks without getting a silly grin plastered on your face.
"A Tale Told by an Idiot," meanwhile, contrary to what its title implies, sounds like it's starting to move into slower and more serious territory comparatively, with all these dramatic piano notes going over all these mechanical clanking and bleeping synths, humming pads, and vocal samples that pitch themselves up and down like a YT P M V. Though a little before the two-minute mark, the track picks back up in tempo and runs through a few nostalgic, plinky electric piano melodies over a more skittering and tapping beat. The entire track sounds silly and strange, but also oddly heartwarming at the same time, as is kind of a common theme with pretty much this entire album.
Then we get the album single, "A Bendy Nonukan Space." Which picks up the energy more with a bunch of skittering breakbeats going up next to these huge, imposing piano chords and orchestral stabs that really give the track this large-scale sound that still remains even through the goofy little arpeggios and subtle reverb-covered vocal samples. Later on, the track keeps building up and down some moments that feel fast and open and comparatively low-key, but keep getting paid off by the much more energetic moments. Lots of fun, as usual.
Next, we got the album's longest cut, "Made Away Themselves," which is a much slower one, though not any less exciting. The beginning is made up of all these chopped-up samples of old-timey choruses going up over a fairly lethargic beat and the usual Spunk Shine piano chords, building into all these spacey chords that remind me of like neon lights flashing in the dark or something. Though later, the track switches over into a lower key but double-time beat going over brooding washes of bass and low-key electric piano planks, building back into the core samples wheezing over this big stomping beat. The entire mix feels so vast and important sounding, as if it's evoking venturing out into the unexplored territories of outer space, and then eventually finishing with a more comforting piano-centric section at the very end.
After that, we have "Striding the Blast," one of the weirder cuts. First starting to sound like it's picking up where the last track left off with this incoherent cloud of pads, and then breaking into these strange filtered chords and a tambourine-tinged breakbeat that resembles the one he's used on a few old tracks like "Synaptic Pruning" and "Shielded Realism," but much crisper sounding and like it's been rearranged a bit. And there's a few honking synth melodies going over it too. And then there's also one point where everything dies down to near silence aside from some really subtle bass washes that keep up the same core progression the track had up to this point, also being joined by some lonely little Rhodes electric piano blips, and eventually building back into the territory it started out in. It's one of those tracks that is like very serious and very unserious at the same time, in that particular way that again, you can only get from Spunk Shine.
And that's followed up by the most subtle, melancholic, and stripped-back track in the bunch, "Death by Planet." Every Spunk Shine album's got to have at least one of these tracks that focuses on moody synth chords and creates a really subtle ambience like this. And for what it's worth, these tracks do tend to be among the lower points in any given album of his. See old tracks of his like "The Fatal Softness of the Earth" or "Music for the Needlessly Attractive." But this track feels like it's perfectly keeping pace with the quality of the project so far. Joining its low-key synth chords with a few lonely orchestral woodwind samples and subtle electric piano lines, it still feels very emotionally resonant and feels like it would make for a good soundtrack to looking up at the stars at night. And it doesn't feel like it's weighing down the pacing either. It feels like a natural progression from the weirder and quirkier moments that led up to it. It was my least favorite when I first heard the album, but really grew on me quickly and is now one of the big standout moments for me.
And from there, the album slowly starts to build back up into said quirky territory with "The Sheer Unnecessary Scale of It," which starts out with big expansive washes of synth chords, Vangelis-style synth lines, and low-mix samples of cheery chorus vocals, building into quiet moments of low-key pianos and sections with buzzing, glitched-up breakbeats, and leading into a greater payoff preceded by a sample about people needing an escape from reality and seeing the unreal is beautiful, which in some ways just kind of sums up the tone of the whole album again. This track is spaced out, it's pretty, it bangs in moments, it keeps me engaged the whole time, and it's somehow not even really a big standout. I actually marked it as my least favorite. That's the standards this album is going by.
Then we get one last big uptempo cut in "Brightness That Cannot Be Harmed," which starts out with these dramatic chords and some samples of operatic choirs, eventually building up these skittering mixes of tapping percussion and vocal samples, and paying off into more banging beats later. Getting a section with all this heavy bass that half sounds like piccato strings but sounds huge, as if you're hearing them after having been shrunk down to the size of a bug, going up next to more chopped-up vocal samples that sound more like friendly soul singers, but also featuring a few moments of the lowest key and smallest sounding little piano keys yet. Really, just never a dull moment in this album.
And finally, that takes us to the ending, "To Living," the big bittersweet emotional finish, featuring nothing but warm ambient pads and heartwarming vocoders and even some slow-moving violins. Pretty standard for a Spunk Shine album closer, but this one does really pack one last big emotional punch. It makes me feel like the loved ones you may have lost are looking back down on you from up above. This one really got to me. This is this is really freaking good. Fantastic finish.
There isn't a single weak track on here, or one that felt like it lost the plot. Although when I first listened to this thing, it was on Bandcamp, and I saw that there were two more bonus tracks left at this point, and I thought, "Okay, these are probably going to be the weaker moments that I'm not going to care for as much." But no, the bonus tracks are really freaking good too. I mean, I see why they're bonus tracks, 'cause they don't really feel like there's a good place to put them, like pacing-wise, but they're just as high quality as all the tracks on the main album.
"Perverse Instantiation," or uh, that one's all strange and dramatic with its off-kilter old-timey samples going up against big Hans Zimmer horn blares, featuring one little random side track into some low-key jazzy sample as well. It's legit pretty epic and would have been a big favorite even if it made the main album. The other bonus track, "A Lesser Quantum of Coercion," goes for a much more chilling and subtle approach, a moody little piece of very lonely, shifting ambience going over minimal breakbeats. Feels like it could soundtrack some scene in a movie where the main character is driving on the highway in the dead of night all by themselves, and later building up these thudding electric bass samples and much heavier and more banging breakbeats later on. It's obviously not as effective a finish as the real ending in "To Living," but it wouldn't make for that bad a finish in its own right.
And that's everything on "A Memory of Something Vast and Elemental." This album is so freaking good, like year-end contender good. Sure, pretty much every single sound in this album is stuff I've heard Spunk Shine do plenty of times before, but I was kind of blindsided by how well all of it was executed. There are tracks that maybe I don't absolutely love, but there's not a single one where I felt like my attention trailed off. And it's all really well-sequenced and paced to flow well. The ambient moments don't feel like out-of-nowhere downers as they sometimes have on his other albums, and they never clash with the quirky or more uptempo moments. All of it feels like it naturally fits together. And sure, I did once again hear a couple of sample loops that I've come across before while making my own music, but hearing them never once took me out of the experience either. And I'd be one heck of a hypocrite if I actually complained about using loops for their own sake. It's literally what I do.
I just love the way this entire thing sounds, at once very silly and playful, but also very nice and comforting too. Listening to it gives me the same feeling as like watching a lecture from a really enthusiastic science teacher who really cares about passing on the new discoveries in the field and how freaking cool the universe we live in is. On a broader scale, it's just really nice. It instantly put me in a good mood, and the way only Spunk Shine's music can. And yeah, I don't know what else to say about it. This was really something special. I definitely recommend checking it out. I'm overall feeling a strong 8.5 out of 10. But of course, this is just my opinion. You can feel free to disagree with it, but I'd like to hear your thoughts, so leave them in the comment thing down there. Shout out to my Patreon supporters, they're awesome people. You want to add yourself to that list? Link to my Patreon is in the description. But yeah, that's pretty much it. That's all for today. See you next time. [Music]