Showing posts with label Blank Banshee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blank Banshee. Show all posts

Thursday 19 January 2017

Blank Banshee "MEGA" (2016)


The striking simplicity of the album cover alone is what sparked my curiosity and drew me in for a listen. Initially the oddity of sparse drum patterns and unusual sampling arrangement seemed like a reinvention of ideas, music from a different perspective. With each listen Ive grown increasingly disappointed with the lack of connection to the aesthetic journey this record goes on. At thirty three minutes it amounts to not much more than an assortment of ideas the yield little imagination for narrative or direction as a seemingly unstructured set of noises vibe with one another at the edge of reality. It certainly has a vibe, a feeling but my interpretation of the unfolding sounds amounted to no emotional stimulus. With only one or two raises of the eye brown its been a fruitless listening experience.

Its music of cosmetics, with an interesting identity of pleasant ambiguity. Everything revolves around the web of samples that shuffle around the beat of each track. The kicks, snares, rattles of cymbals and reverb soaked claps are sparing and minimal, providing a moderate tempo for all sorts of chopped and pitch shifted sounds to wage in on the atmosphere. Many snippets and samples resemble known, popular songs, one I identified was Death Grips's "Bass Rattle Stars Out The Sky". They mostly contribute to the mysteriously associative nature of the ongoing sample arrangement.

From that point it would mostly be an exercise of naming and describing the sorts of sound that crop up. For me they all amounted to very little that was emotionally impact-full or even entertaining. Thanks to the decent production it is a pleasant experience to hear the noises past you by as they are mixed together with equilibrium and often a lush dose of reverb and echo. As already stated though nothing arose, although a few moments in the record are more preferable to others it just didn't have much to offer me.

Rating: 3/10