Sean Sharp's Diary

Glaive takes another stab, furthering his sound down the hyperpop rabbit hole. Over the past 3 projects, he has experimented more and more with his unique take on hyperpop. Typically, the genre finds itself clashing with nightcore and constant stimulation, but glaive finds ways to slow it down, but still delivers that crazy energy when needed. Unfortunately, this seems a bit messy in my eyes. Several songs share memorable moments and ear-aching vocals/production. This is the tightrope that is always walked, but it doesn't balance everything it needs to in this case. I will always applaud his efforts in making something unique like this, but overall, some more refining is needed.

Figured it was time to do my occasional check-in on BONES. This dude confuses me to the extreme. I constantly find songs by him that I absolutely love but anytime I listen to a "full" project by him, it's mediocre at best. I suppose when he releases as much music as he does, he's bound to hit the target every once in a blue moon. This album doesn't really seem to land at almost any point. The emo screaming on "HouseMadeOfSticks" is just downright hard to listen to. While most of the rest of the album doesn't drop that low in quality, it is just boring. His albums are always short but typically his rap style and eerie production really work well with the format. This album doesn't feature any traditional BONES production or rapping which he has been straying away from in recent years. BONES is definitely one of the artists that people will be nostalgic for his older work, and typically it's because the new style doesn't meld well with how the old fans' personalities age, but in this case, BONES has just started making worse music in a different genre. The only redeeming quality here is when he briefly finds the light on what this genre could sound like if he put a bit more thought and effort in it. "SuitYourself" and "TallPaleAndUgly" feature some vocal effects that make his vocals more spacious matching the midwest light guitar a bit better. When his vocals are at the forefront of the production, he losses the atmosphere that could be there. Overall though, even if he did capitalize on this throughout the rest of the album, it still misses interesting verses, gripping choruses, and it has an abundance of dead air where boring production just plays... and plays... and plays. Somehow it still only manages to be 26 minutes in total.

Labrinth is tough to pin down as I can tell he has a massive creative mind but it seems he needs someone to reel him in a bit more. I suppose there is a reason why most of the stuff I like by him is in collaboration with other artists. This album is the most out there project that I've heard by him. I mean the ending of "S.W.M.F." is just... lol. He constantly looks to switch up the composition of songs and how they evolve but it feels pretty jolting at times. In comparison to Quadeca's "Vanisher, Horizon Scraper", Labrinth takes abrasive horns paired with almost random synths and tries to ping pong back and forth with the occasional more full orchestral composition. The jumping back and forth feels like a headache. Quadeca is the example of how to do this constant transition well with everything flowing in and out with it never living in a consistent state. Labrinth did task himself with something much harder sonically though. A cosmic opera is a far harder challenge to achieve than the swaying of the ocean that Quadeca goes for. (Not to discredit Quadeca's work. Just pointing out that the idea was something more achievable.) I don't mean for this to turn into a Quadeca glaze. I just think Labrinth could take a few pointers from a macro level and see how he could apply them even though he is obviously musically talented as is.