Friday, February 21st, 2014

Amir Acid – Vaakonesh

We can’t agree on what makes a good production.


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[5.75]
Patrick St. Michel: Nice enough production…and that’s all I got.
[4]

Will Adams: When the production and vocals are this gorgeous, I have to wonder if the fact that this sort of music isn’t massive in the Western world has more to do with the language barrier. And it sure as hell isn’t the overstuffed chorus.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: It is 2014, and despite (or because of) the best-spent billions of Silicon Valley, there is still no useful tool for music discovery. Half of them are trying to sell you the HAERTS EP, the other are so futzed by the rule of averages the best they can do is to pipe up that if you like Kate Bush you may also like Joni. If you want to hear something you otherwise wouldn’t, the adage holds true: do it yourself, and probably by accident. “Vaakonesh” I found via that old trick where you plug a buncha formatting into Google and come up with people’s index directories of mp3s, and once you filter out Wally Was His Name and other jackholes, it’s really quite viable. The method has its biases — it’s skewed toward big names, naturally, and blogpop from mp3 sites that don’t delete their archives, and France for some reason — but sometimes you stumble across things you wouldn’t normally encounter, like some guy in Iran with a large directory of pop songs, US and otherwise. Thing is, with “Vaakonesh”‘s drifty, spacious production — Rico Love doing Glass Candy, perhaps — and the way Amir Acid’s vocals push the chorus subtly into gear, it’s easy to imagine this crossing over. In a different world.
[8]

Sabina Tang: It transpires I can’t recognize sung Persian. This sounds like the kind of meticulous, soothing, electronic-to-its soles headphone pop a Scandinavian nation might send to Eurovision in a recession year; or discreet diagetic background to a film scene set in an upscale wine bar… well, basically anywhere upscale wine bars are found.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The resonating, liquidity of some of these beats sound like this was recorded in the bottom of a water tower, but in a good way.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: The oft-unusual poetry of computer-translated lyrics: “a positive response to mutual love,” “treasure every moment you think of the love you feel inside your brain” and er, “I’m not an isolated patch of dry nitrogen.” Which he’s not. Although like gaseous nitrogen, he is mostly inert, floating sluggishly around his celestial environment without much of an ability to fully react with it. A vocalist with more character would suit better.
[6]

Brad Shoup: He likes Depeche Mode, I get that, but he thinks they’re too serious. This isn’t the remedy.
[5]

Alfred Soto: What I smell: burning circuitry, thanks to a tumult of ideas, some not good.
[4]

Reader average: [8.25] (4 votes)

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