Review Summary: Strawberries and cream
Analysing
Toil and Trouble is silly. Would you critique a hug, or hug the hug? I mean, it’d be rude not to. With the same regular reliability that icecream melts and puppies bork, Angelo’s music
steadies, enveloping with blankets and pillows and cookies and tea.
The formula never changes. “Carrie & Lowell” worship is emitted from end-of-bed, plus “Either/Or” gravel and De Augustine's own secret burger sauce a.k.a. that dishevelled
i can ride my bike with no handlebars moxie. Smol melodic sprinkles are (uh) sprinkled more readily than 2017’s uncompromised haze bomb,
Swim Inside the Moon, more sure footed in everything alike
Tomb (2019) and
A Beginner’s Mind (2021). Pastel is exchanged for matt, or maybe gloss, via 27(!) instruments, all played/recorded/produced/mixed by our BOI, not that you could tell he’s been that busy. “Memory Palace” is simplicity itself, Melotron and Mustel celeste sneaking betwixt bashful oaken strumming. It (i think) helps with the escapism, the mysticism, the ornate hecking luminosity these fairytale tunes cherish in their bones, coaxed warmly to surface via glass xylophone (“The Painter”) and Jap-synth lullabies (“Another Universe”). There’s a grandfather clock in the bubblebath and some bespectacled tuna in heat and the cauldron with the snek, too; all are catered for, gladly, hosted by the wistful and the calm and the
phew of De Augustine's very most decidedly uncomplicated song-craft to date. Screw the headcount; it’s the texture of the brushstrokes that matters.
I feel bad. The marbled, dripping
cri evrytiem lyricism here is evidently lost on me i have been SWEPT UP in the smell of the flowerbed, you see. It’s funny, too; these songs are deceptively unhappy!! Death and absence and gone and bye are unpicked, dreadfully, lending a sad-but-smiling casual despair character when coupled with the instrumental sunshine. Enshrined is the spirit of torchlight, of forget the end and the dark, of trying to, to hope, oh how that wet fish feeling feels. Better. It feels better. Silly to talk about, really.
