Review Summary: About as good as you would expect a Sputnik collaboration to be.
Broken Hearted Extras and The Rotary Parallax, which features Sputnik users Frippertronics (who had the idea and organizes the releases), YakNips, and Notaflower, is the first of many site-wide collaborations under the name Molecular Corporation. This relatively short EP is a tease, showcasing a select few of the artists that will be on the upcoming LP. The tracklisting for that is to be revealed on April 15th, and it's unclear whether these same tracks will be on the full length.
Frippertronics' contributions to the EP (tracks 1, 3, and 5) all suffer from the same problem - a general lack of focus and effort. The first track, "The Rotary Parallax", sounds like random synth generated with FL Studio and its presets in one take. Some of the dissonance is certainly interesting, and the end is terrifying in a fantastic way, but the rest of the track is throwaway. What sounds like an extension/outtake of the first, "The Broken Hearted Extra Track..." has the same random synths; however, having only 20 seconds of this synth dissonance leads to an enjoyable outro. "Major Tom Is Dead (and Is Never Coming Back)" has more thought put into the title than the song itself. Super quiet looped watery sounds that go nowhere at all make for an absolutely pointless track. Clocking in at 4 minutes, 7 seconds, it's about 4 minutes too long.
"I Will Die Alone (Without a Voice, Without a Sound)", despite being somewhat repetitive, is a decent track. It's an effective emotional solo piano track that sounds a bit like the title, due to
YakNips' accentuated notes. The undisputed gem on this release is "Stepping Through the Sky", which comes as an absolute surprise after track 3. Unlike the other tracks on this release, its 4 minute, 40 second runtime is justified. It's a downtempo emotional ambient hip-hop track that builds and builds, adding layers of instruments every few bars to a climax, then fizzles back out until the end like a palindrome.
Notaflower supplied a fully realized, well written, gripping, and generally awesome track, and it almost shouldn't be in such company as the others.
Admittedly, this EP has a remarkable amount of consistency for what it is. Each track flows into the next pretty well. The production and mastering sounds similar, and there's no jarring transition into a different sound like songs on some other compilations. All the tracks have a similar style (minimalistic dreamcore). Also, the artwork is cool even though it looks like a metroid penis (apparently a rocket taking off, which makes sense in context of what this EP is).
The last 5 seconds of the EP say sarcastically (from what I can decipher), "You thought this would be good? Give me a break." Since this project is more of an 'exclusive' compilation, it maintains the same flaws plaguing most user releases. So, a simple solution to enjoy these releases is to listen to the tracks created by users with quality output and avoid the rest. Still, it's exactly what you would expect from a Sputnik collaboration, for better or worse.
