Review Summary: Dear Tundra,
I have been listening to Blackmill's 2011 debut Chillstep album,
Reach For Glory, quite a lot recently on the strength of your recommendation.To be blunt, I found it so uniquely tedious as to compel a review. At first this was going to be an objective, disconnected takedown of Blackmill’s kitschy, dated style, but with a little thought I realized two things: (1) that negatively reviewing an album that you’re practically the only active defender of places the onus of defending it on you and (2) that no matter how much I mitigated this fact you would still read the review as one giant @-post.
I reviewed Shrezzers; that dance is rote.
So, instead, I’m writing this review to you – specifically you – because really the only way to dissect an album with as many unforced errors as
Reach For Glory is to contrast it against the backdrop of your taste. As a preamble, to pin the genres down, Chillstep is an offshoot of Brostep, the normied-up EDM variant of the late-aughts British export that was popularized by Skrillex in the USA to the horror of snobs worldwide with 2010’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. High art diluted for the masses into a shallow, profitable shadow – an almost poetic inversion of the high hopes late philosopher and geriatric yearner Mark Fisher once placed on Burial’s revolutionary sound. But, really, could things be any different? Genre parameters are set by visionaries and filled out by the normal Joes; at a certain point the reaches become boundaries, forcing the genre into an ouroboros solution to creative malnourishment. Chillstep gorges itself on the offal of such an ouroboros, courageously daring to horseshoe the parameters of Brostep back around to being thoughtful and atmospheric.
With this context laid out, your fascination with
Reach For Glory becomes readily apparent, as, by all accounts, Brostep is the Djent of electronic music: each subgenre a regurgitated vomit effigy to the normie-attuned emotional range of their respective parent genres. Chillstep thus follows the aberrations of a simulacrum cloned from a simulacrum, a refinement to the point where the content of the music and the style of the music become almost competing entities within itself.
Reach For Glory is simultaneously the hopelessly overpolished product of genre refinement yet is remarkably amateurish in its musical presentation. Despite structuring every song within the standard trappings of electronic, every song here follows the typical electronic structure of atmospheric builds into euphoric melodic highs driven by wobbling bass, twinkly synth and rearranged vocal samples, Blackmill has absolutely no idea what tones sound good and how to pair them in a complimentary way. Most of the vocal samples are in a squeaky falsetto that sounds, frankly, horrendous, the overdependence on kitsch production tricks hopelessly dates every other moment, and choosing to make the piano
Reach For Glory’s melodic center poisons the whole project with a snide, sneering energy, as if rubbing in that Blackmill’s sound harkens back to a truer form of atmospheric thoughtfulness than his peers. These elements all fundamentally undermine an album that is, structurally speaking, perfectly acceptable, which gets me to why I really wanted to talk about Blackmill.
I only got into electronic music last year and am still relatively pedestrian when it comes to my knowledge of the genre. While I don’t have a refined palette yet, I have slowly begun to recognize the contours of the genre, a journey which Blackmill have granted me something of a revelation along. I understand now what bad electronic music sounds like, and, more than that, what makes it bad. Electronic has both the lowest barrier for creative entry and perhaps the highest potential for subtlety, texture and depth of any musical genre, in part due to the freedom it gives the composer. A great electronic artist understands that there’s no such thing as an empty moment in music and deliberately positions empty space against euphoric walls of sound: I think of Jon Hopkins’ magnificent song, “Breathe This Air”, which, one minute in, stifles the hectic beat with a solitary charismatic piano note that fades into static, or George Fitzgerald’s blissful 2018 album,
All That Must Be, which follows every structural lesson Blackmill relies on but with the caveat of George’s fantastic musical ear for complementary tones. In comparison, Blackmill’s deficiencies are blinding and obvious. Really,
Reach For Glory plays like a demo of someone just starting out, a project that never should have seen the light of day, an empty shell of preexisting foreknowledge without any identity to itself. To its core
Reach For Glory is overly sanitary – a frankly bizarre defining characteristic for an album with no center.
There is almost something beautiful in how someone can see an album so bland and lifeless as meaningful and artful, and for that, my dear Tundra, you remain invaluable to our ecosystem.
Adieu,
Fowl
