Review Summary: and so what if i have to google what the song titles mean
Genre is confusing. The idea itself is a series of increasingly blurry lines, conflating and permuting until any kind of rational discourse is undone by a single adjective, like ‘post-‘ or ‘alternative’. Slap a label on it, move on.
Professedly, I get it. I get that annexing a label to music is a summary of its sound, ideology and the space it occupies within its subculture. It becomes problematic, though, when the discussion of genre motivates perception.
Someone said the newest Godspeed record is heavy on drone? Guess I’ll give it a miss, then. It’s reductive and myopic.
To reconcile this phenomena with Adjy’s discography, Sputnik insists on calling the band ‘indie pop’ and sure, the cheerleader’s refrain in
Praepositio could be considered pop, if the pop-star in question flirted with canonical literature and meta-lyricism. With this considered, it's interesting that ambiguous descriptors like 'indie' are at once wholly appropriate and even further from the truth than Dan Kaffee in
A Few Good Men. Yet,
Prelude (.3333) is not a lazy patchwork consisting of far-removed musical styles, but a creative synthesis of traditional instrumentation to form something natural and pioneering.
Another Flammarion Woodcut’s musical theatre fleshes out its backstory with swelling backing vocals and keen-edged drum fills before turning off all the lights – a lone piano motif revealing the past’s effect on our narrator’s psyche. So, I guess you could call it indie pop, but you could also call it popera, or emo-pop, or indie rock, or does-it-really-matter-this-shit-is-good.
I like the idea that
Prelude (.3333) is admirably difficult to pin down because it’s a prelude that is terrified of being forgotten or left behind.
Praepositio throws itself at the listener, arguing tenaciously that the record is too rich and imaginative to be the foreword in some other narrative. I’m inclined to agree – the stampeding drumbeat makes the whole thing breathless, the vocals and guitars struggle to keep up, and two lyrical perspectives shout over each other until they sound like different philosophical discussions with all buzzwords and no substance. So, I guess you could call Adjy ‘philosophical thrash-pop’.
Like a brochure with actual, prolonged chapters, this record is unexpectedly verbose and overran with ideas. From the layered pontifications in
Grammatology to the arrhythmic, stuttering vocal melody in
Hyperthemesia, the EP deliberately takes wrong turns to make the journey more captivating. I think
Prelude (.3333) will always feel anachronistic because you can’t pick its influences. To be fair, indie pop is a fine enough tag because it would be difficult to describe Adjy’s music without being annoyingly specific, and that’s testament to the interesting songwriting choices that litter the record. So, I guess you could call my listening experience ‘thoroughly impressed’, but I don’t want to split hairs.
