I seldom find a record that interests me… or even agrees with me.
Apparently there’s a lot of this sort of throwback record being made these days. I can’t decide how I feel about them.
Sounds a LOT like 10cc:
Except that was something like 1975. And if you’ve ever heard the 10CC records on reel or vinyl to actually know what they really sound like, you’ll immediately recognize them as some of the best recorded records of their era. Staggering quality, despite otherwise fluffy. That’s clearly NOT being matched by the latest batch of (hold your nose) hipster records imitating the era. They seem to be mostly taking the SMASH approach.
Here’s another example:
Sounds a lot like Synergy, (I’ve written about this 5 years ago. I am way ahead of my time, you should know this.)
Oh, wait. That WAS Synergy, sample and compressed:
I’m going to call that a little distasteful, if not outright insulting to your audience. A weird area at least- that’s no sample, that’s a remix to be generous.
On the one hand, it’s great to hear these sounds again. It’s a great antidote for everything that was happening to electronic music in the 00′s.
On the other hand, I get this sneaking suspicion that there’s not a lot of genuine expression here. I feel like if I met the people who made these records, I’d hate these records. The graphic design appears to be taking the Tim and Eric aesthetic- deliberately trying to appear low value, low quality.
All of this is a really simple, really boring cat and mouse game. If you want to be cool in a couple years now, start aggressively trying to be as uncool as possible by coopting as much as you can from whatever era is super-uncool. Right now, I’d say that era is about 1983-1993. You should start out with people thinking “are they serious? are they just dorks?” Once people become sure, your fame is about to explode very briefly until they identify you as posers and then stop buying your records.