Friday, May 29th, 2015

Cheat Codes ft. Evan Gartner – Adventure

Video game sounds perfect for the beach?


[Video][Website]
[4.25]

Josh Langhoff: “Now that Owl City’s on tour, the market for closing credits songs in animated movies WILL BE OURS!!!!”
[3]

Nina Lea Oishi: Evan Gartner’s delivery is too mild and snoozy to suggest any real yearning for adventure; even the yelp at the end of the word “pretending” loses its novelty the second time around. But the rest of the production is a decent dose of Super Mario-fun, each weird-cute beep and boink conjuring up pixelated gold coins and romps around a cotton-candy digital world.
[4]

Iain Mew: The elongated bloops sound more obviously like Anamanaguchi than actual video games. Either way, they’re easily the freshest element enlivening some indie-pop that’s harmless, but wimpy enough to conjure thoughts of Owl City.
[5]

Alfred Soto: “All I want is an adventure,” he sings, defined as distorted chipmunk voices and knob twiddling.
[2]

Micha Cavaseno: Yeah, this was an adventure like a trip to a mall is an exciting change for a family.
[2]

Brad Shoup: Like bobbing in a wave pool in the thirty seconds before the solenoid’s activated. Only it’s a poorly calibrated solenoid, and you’re jammed with rays in calm waters, as children babble around you and some high-school sophomore murmurs sweet asininity to his summer crush.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: >KILL IT What?! With this song? >YES Your idea of “adventure” is climbing a hill and you sound like American Authors. Come now.
[4]

Jessica Doyle: Who is this for? Because from the first note I cast it in that line of songs that play in the background in that life I wanted to have and felt too cowardly to have, something far more urban and artificial, dramatic and discomfiting, taxing and beautiful. Like when I was thirteen, hugging myself in an upstairs bedroom watching Stephen Spinella win a Tony and thank “the husband of my heart”; or a few years later, wanting desperately to fit in with the English majors who played Future Bible Heroes on our college radio and comforted each other during midnight milkshake runs at a diner down the Blue Route; and then actually in New York, only somehow whatever it was remained just out of reach, and I was too conventional and too depressed to actually find it. But surely that particular reaction has more to do with me (and with how the intersection of “queerness” and music got filtered to 1980s Top-40 radio and suburban-safe girl ears) than with anything actually going on. So: who is this for? Who is this for? I’m too stuck in my own story; I need to hear someone else’s.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: If Unicorn Kid had received the success this cruel, unready world neglectfully failed to bestow upon him, then a) he might still be Unicorn Kid, who knows, and b) this song would have been created to piggyback on his success, probably by Owl City. Evidently it has been made anyway, and not by Owl City, but like his best songs it is almost unnervingly sincere in its simplicity of sentiment, and most readily describable as “pleasant”.
[6]

Mo Kim: The midway point between Owl City and Madeon, with warm, sweeping sounds filtered through glitchy electro-house textures. Evan Gartner’s an amiable if slight presence: his cry for adventure is less a demand than a coax, a proposal to leave the house to make an ice cream run. 
[6]

Will Adams: A bit of poor timing to release a harmless song that shares a title with an album that achieves this type of bright dancepop so much better. I wouldn’t mind hearing it at a beach party.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: Synth-pop with electro touches that you’ve heard hundreds of times before.
[3]

Reader average: [7] (2 votes)

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One Response to “Cheat Codes ft. Evan Gartner – Adventure”

  1. Maybe it’s to our credit that no one made a “ft. Justin Bailey” joke.