Lo-Fi is Sci-Fi – We Were Wrong
Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority
I will use beverages to help me out with this. I am a big coffee person. I prefer the fancy vanilla latte verses the average cup of joe, and I don’t drink tea unless there are no other options. This 8-track album is like a cup of tea when I could have a latte. It is not exciting, like tea. There is nothing going on. The music is so relaxed that it bores me, like something I would listen to in order to fall asleep.
The chords are bland with the same progressions, and the lyrics are cliché. Example (from the second track), “The script you wrote is terrible/but I like you anyway.” In addition, there is unnecessary noise before and after tracks, like at the very beginning of the album and the end of “Deep Red.” The only good thing going for this is the nice vocal harmony, but even then, it travels in thirds and fifths, which is no good. Having the same general harmony makes it even more boring.
The guitars are either acoustic or distorted (which needs to not be so intense for whatever genre this is), and sometimes you will find an intermediary. The press pack says, “It’s hard to pin down exactly what these guys are all about.” I could not have said it any better myself. Tea is fine every now and then, but it is not something I would indulge in. This is for those tea drinkers out there; but for me, they were in fact wrong.
-Emily Robinson
fpvm@iup.edu