Track-by-track review:
insula
Hot (?) take: I love this intro track. This is the ending to a sci-fi film more than an album opener, like the literal sonic EMBODIMENT of films like Ex-Machina and 2001: A Space Odyssey (disclaimer: I’ve never actually watched this movie) and Interstellar. It makes you SO excited for the rest of the album.
Ex-Machina, in the best way possible.
Cut Me
Everything about this song makes me fall in love. It’s my favorite song off the entire album, easily. Hearing the first 30 seconds of Cut Me is actually what motivated me to finally stop talking about how I have a music blog and actually write a review, that’s how much I adore it.
Just—the subtle horns and guitar string plucking (I think?) in the background, the blend of Moses Sumney’s voice (ethereal and light as always) but also the boppiness and jazziness of it all. It’s stripped down and yet it’s not, at all.
But more than the technical elements of the song itself—there’s just a feeling to it. Like usually when I listen to music it takes repeats to process the song. Would That I by Hozier is now one of my favorite songs of all time, OF ALL TIME, but I remember the first time I heard it I didn’t really think much of it. Cut Me is one of the few songs that on the first round through, I was like—whoa. I feel this. I’m experiencing an emotion that I’ve been waiting to feel, but I can’t even name. It’s like—I heard Cut Me and I already loved it even when I was hearing it for the first time in that present moment? If that makes any sense.
Has me in love.
[Note from Anika: Wait also, the chorus is amazing — “What cuts me, cuts me, cuts me, cut me, cut me, cut me” — uh, yes? True? I think Moses has the kind of lyrics that sound so deep but are hard to understand (kind of like a Bon Iver vibe) or sound deep but aren’t actually that deep, but this song strikes a pretty good balance. Really dig this one.]
In Bloom
Moses Sumney, you already know your voice is like heaven! This song has the same stripped-yet-not-stripped-boppy-guitar-pluck feeling as Cut Me, but maybe a little more romance, a little more tenderness? It radiates joy, though, and I think I’m sold. And the tonal changes within the song are solid; the lyrics, though hard to make out through the vibes, are good as well (this goes for the rest of the album, virtually). Possible points off because it sounds pretty similar to other tracks on the album. But that’s a problem every artist who isn’t, like, Kanye or Frank Ocean, faces—and also generally, if you listen to large chunks of an album in one sitting as I do for these reviews, it starts to blend together. So it’s not—it doesn’t ruin things, you know?
Solid track.
Virile
The opening strings immediately took me to a Cosmic-Love-Florence-and-the-Machine type beat, except the vocals are very serpentwithfeet. Then the song bangs into something more energetic, with DRUMS and still the same floating vocals but it’s got a JAM to it, percussion and distorted noises and you feel it, yeah? The melody could be better, and lyrics a bit more discernible, but it’s good for the vibes. Also, the little humming note of harmonizations at the end, when instrumental briefly takes a break, is so charming.
I swooned!
Conveyor:
Why is this a rock song, but also not a rock song? Why does Moses’ voice sound like it is an entire choir reverbing distantly through the fields of time? I don’t buy into the melody of this song, quite, but again that’s personal preference. Otherwise, it’s not a bad showing.
Not bad nonrock rock.
boxes
- stuttering
That was the single note I wrote down about this track while initially listening to græ: Part 1**, and yeah. That’s the feeling I get from the song.
stuttering
Gagarin
It’s cool enough, but doesn’t immediately differentiate itself relative to other songs on the album. There are some interesting distortions on his voice, good vibes with the synths and the low “oh-whoa-whoa” in the background, but I think there’s still the key problem that separates a lot of “pretty good” songs from great songs: is like every unit of time the song exists for earning itself? Or I guess, how to say it, is the content of the song interesting enough to warrant its length? Gargarin is just short of six minutes long, and a lot of those six minutes feel unnecessary to me. Particularly the instrumental in the latter half of the song I think aren’t new enough to occupy the amount of time they do.
A little overlong, for what it is.
jill/jack
A quieter voice memo / production experiment. I think it can be a little hard to listen to all the way through, but the point is clearly to try out new things, and in that respect, it does what it’s supposed to. [Note from Anika: I actually really dug it, I love how the vocal overlays changed the meaning of the phrases they used, both voices in the song were really fascinating, and, of course, I always love the image of powerful women 😤 ]
It’s been dug!
Colouour
The distant horns at the opening are so lovely and heartbreaking, I’m briefly getting flashbacks to Cut Me in terms of falling-in-love-instantly! But then: can he make good on the promise the intro delivers? He follows it with something soft and sweet, where his voice is more vulnerable than before, and there’s the occasional reverb of electric beats, the shifting-ssshing noise in the background that just blends in. I didn’t feel like this song needed to end sooner than it did, I didn’t get bored, and I was charmed–one of the clearer, better efforts on the album.
One of the lovelier ones!
also also also and and and
Again, hard to say anything because it’s not a song so much as an experiment, but yeah.
Neither/nor
Okay, I think this song has moments of loveliness. In the seconds before the 1:55 mark, we’ve been so far hearing a classic t h i s i s a h y m n type song, strings and Moses Sumney’s voice and all, but you begin to hear a subtle thudding beat in the background, like a drum, and you hear an almost EDM/techno infusion; for a second there, I was convinced the song was going to become something like Anderson .Paak’s Get Em Up, and it would’ve been amazing and gravitational and explosive! But alas, it vibe-switches to a bopping, stripped, jazzy kind of thing. Another vibe-switch at 2:25 onwards, as it becomes less about the bop of the instrumentals in the background and more about the melody. It’s just–like, objectively pretty good, but again. Very similar to other stuff on the album and I feel like it could’ve gone in a better direction.
It has potential, but it’s untapped.
Polly One of the singles to come out before the album, it’s a bit more subdued and a bit less “quirky” than some of the other tracks on the album. The atmosphere of it is really, really similar to Me in 20 Years—with, imo, a worse melody and less transcendence. It’s not that it’s a bad song, just given its adjacency to Me in 20 Years (which I loved) it’s hard not to be like: why this song, on this album?
It’s good, but I wish it was Me in 20 Years!
Overall Thoughts
GOOD STUFF:
- It reminds me of serpentwithfeet’s soil in some ways (though I’d argue it’s a bit less out there / interesting sonically)–and comparing any album to soil is an extremely high compliment, so that means something. Speaking of, if you haven’t listened to soil, LISTEN to soil, because that album is—impossible to turn away from and impossible to dislike. It’s an album that’s about love in the way not much music seems to be anymore—love in a way that’s devotional and single-minded and obsessive and probably unhealthy in that it’s more like religion than a functional relationship but goddamn does it make for good fucking music.
- It’s undeniably, a good effort. It reminds me a lot, of the top of my head, of Bon Iver’s i,i and Roy Blair’s EP GRAFFITI in that there’s an obvious effort to be interesting and to do new stuff in terms of production.
BUT (NOT AS GOOD):
- There are a lot of “tricks” in this album (you can see it in the song titles lmao), spikes that make it interesting—and the album sounds good—but it doesn’t actually feel new. There’s not really anything that’s truly like: I’ve never heard of that before. I appreciate the effort, but—there’s crazier music out there, you know? Kai Whiston’s 2018 album, Kai Whiston Bitch. Everything by the anonymous and unknowable and d e e p l y u n d e r g r o u n d JAPA_KNEES. And I say this SO much that I should be banned from saying it ever again, but: Yeezus was ahead of its time.
- TLDR; the album feels like it’s trying to be e x p e r i m e n t a l more than it is a real experiment.
- But also it’s 8:16pm on Super Tuesday and I also apparently really like Rex Orange County now (it IS a phase, I swear), so what do I really know?
- TLDR; the album feels like it’s trying to be e x p e r i m e n t a l more than it is a real experiment.
- It also runs into the vibe differentiation problem, but that’s nonunique, almost.
OUTRIGHT QUALMS:
- Me in 20 years wasn’t on this part of the album!! And out of the singles he released prior to the album, it was the best by far. Just so like floating and with excellent lyrics and you t r a n s c e n d—Moses, why?
The Culinarity™ Score:
| 6.6 |
Want an explanation of our scoring system? See here.