Review Summary: “I think all pop music should be about who can make the loudest, brightest thing...”
-SOPHIE
On the website for this there is a quote by the late electronic pop star SOPHIE that references making art to be "loud, colorful, vibrant," all of these adjectives that reflect the colorful website that this quote is paired.
***RANT INCOMING
As far as the album is concerned though, this thing rarely enchants or even remotely seems inspired beyond the radio, nostalgia aesthetic that was also used on the last album. It seems like OPN is hanging around the biggest and best electronic artists (the most popular as underground electronic scenes rarely survive) which is fair as he is one of the best musicians to come around in the last two decades. The problem with this though is that grandiosity and concept have slowly seeped into the general form of OPN's music and style. Pop musicians make WAY more money and get WAY more attention than regular musicians working on shoestring budgets but time and time again this has not always proven to make their music any better, regardless of how much money they dump into their marketing budget. I mean, the music that got OPN internet relevance was overblown, messy and repetitive but there was still tons of material that he had been making before Chuck Person's Eccojam Vol. 1 and it in many ways shows the flipside of how to generate interest in your music beyond utilizing a marketing team.
Fans were able to see the release of rifts which was a nice way to catalogue all of the past material into one release but it was essentially a re-release (although it does contain the best version of When I Return From New York imo). Now with Magic OPN we have received a new style of OPN music disguised somewhat as an evolution into a brighter future with more bonus material, a blue ray dvd containing a music video for every track, and an album cover that makes my eyes bleed. All of this is for new content but because OPN is dealing in samples with his music the directions taken could be endless and so the need to be flashy, new or popular is strange and gives makes the whole album feel uninspired and less of a journey as many of his other albums.
***segue back to actual review
We kick off the album with Cross Talk I of which there are four of on the album, and all are simulated radio switches or transitions between tracks on the album. There are fine I guess but what was once an elusive electronic project has now become a juke-box machine and it seems a bit forced, especially because all the tracks blend together anyway. This brings me to the actual tracks on the album which are... well just OK. If you are hanging around your really boring co-workers and you don't want to come off as a weirdo but you still want to seem esoteric than maybe this album would fit that setting. You could talk about the 80's with your other 20 something year old friends, and try to find some strange inspiration by digging through your own recreation of the past and imagine what it would be like to live during those times. For me though, personally, this just makes me kind of depressed.
None of these tracks stand out to me btw, except for maybe The Weather Channel which swaps up to a tolerable auto tune track at the end, although it also reminds me of his last album of which I found to be an extremely grating listening and his worst project to date. There is also
Tales From The Trash Stratum which has a nice change up of noise in the beginning but this trails off very quickly and the energy here is sorely missed on the rest of the tracks which to me just sound like texture goop similar to what the swamy swans from Dr. Seuss's The Lorax get stuck in when the Onceler pollutes the world. Everything else is just similar sounding textural sounds that all take a similar linear direction stemming from the albums overall concept and this kind of makes everything here sound like it's power level is handicapped to be only 20% of what it could have been if more creative liberties or more planning went into this "sonic journey".
I can see why this might be a more "friendly" version of OPN's music but it makes me doubly mad because we have only really seen one release in the vein of Replica, which in many ways is like the odd child out from the rest of the albums in that it contains some tracks that sound more akin to R Plus Seven sketches mixed with some ambient similar to Returnal (but not like rifts, more concrete, straight environmental drone tracks) mixed with the distinct sample collage style that only exist on Replica. And Replica is only 40 minutes with half of that time being filled with tracks that are a not like the others.
The music found on Replica to me is something that for years I have been hoping to hear more from OPN but alas, the direction he has been taking is more nostalgia based, more gooey and more forgettable .
