Review Summary: 己ヨ几己回尺と 回レヨ尺し回丹句
A platoon of bedroom-dwelling overworked students can swish a frustration-passion project to the stratosphere of online popularity, if said project accurately channels their own assumed misfortune and fatigue. And so it was that in early months of the year of our lord a South Korean somebody chugging heaps of cheap powder coffee and procrastinating on finals drops a Will Toledo on our ass so spectacularly that middle aged champions of millennial music and millennial counter-culturists on all reputable critic sites including the Pitchspoon, Monogum, InconsequentialSound and Hubblemusic.com (and many more to come) publish fawning reviews, snippets, minutes, feuilletons and reports on this new master of disheartened picked-a-wrong-major barista-pop. There, in an ever-ascending trend of westerners realising that Asia makes music too, 𝒫𝒶𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓃🌸𝓊𝓁 dared to compose a lo-fi pop from their bedroom.
gasp
On “Excuse” one’d expect the vocals to churn up a black metal shriek any moment. The track goes wonderfully heavy and works well with the bedroom a e s t h e t i c (until the long vocal C note at the end that the singer just cannot pull off). “Youth Rebellion” is a decent tune that goes on forever. “Analog Sentimentalism” and “I Can Feel My Heart Touching You” are both interesting enough instrumentally, but lack a proper memorable tune. “Extra Story” is a nice detour toward the end, but has no discernible personality on its own. And that’s kind of what this album is, plenty of promise and snippets of potential, all followed by plenty of mostly grating sound that fills up any possible fissure of freshness for the style.
Plentiful is the album also on the head-over-heels ambitious experiments and ideas, 𝒫𝒶𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓃🌸𝓊𝓁 mostly employs the throw-***-at-the-wall tactic. “White Ceiling”, a 10-minute mastodon, is a generally good track that comes off as a great noisy tune one invents in his head and then has trouble letting go, so it goes on forever without ever really developing into anything multi-faceted or complex. Just kinda stays the same messy tune the whole was through. Another such moment is a confusing little (actually quite long, not little) post-rock attempt with “Age of Fluctuation” that starts off, proceeds and pretty much ends with a generic riff and has very little in terms of change of pace. Only somewhere in the middle you get a jarring noisy shriek of a production jump that compresses each difficult to stomach high-pitched tinnitus the album already presents into one continuous wave of gulp.
But credit where it’s due, 𝒫𝒶𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓃🌸𝓊𝓁 can strike gold. The opener “Beautiful World” actually sets up a rather lovely image, where the lo-lo-lo-fi bedroom sound only serves to accentuate the gentle nature of the track. Furthermore “Chicken” is the closest we get to having a song with multiple clearly defined sections complementing each other and still sounding distinct. And the title track, “To See the Next Part of the Dream” is a beautiful atmospheric piece, where clarity of sound actually seeps through and does not get cluttered by the morose noise. It is peculiar to hear 𝒫𝒶𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓃🌸𝓊𝓁 do so little in terms of change and yet accomplish so much in quality just from track to track. Which either means he has immense talent he does not yet know how to channel properly, or those moments of goodness are purely accidental. But most importantly, I found it quite bizarre that the final track contains a full 10 minute cut of Thom Yorke interview talking about aliens anal-probing the Vietnamese government.
P.S.: there really ought to be a coffee tailor-made for broke students, call it depresso or something.
