GREEN

It seems I hit overtook the 'rating without review' mark. Now please do compare my final rating with my other ratings, and you'll get some info about my taste, so you can judge for yourself is James Sudakow's music and his album 'Green' is for you or not.

See? The easiest review ever!

(...)

Okay, I will say a thing or two but it might be nasty.

The good things about this album are the timbres of artist's electric violin - it's often overdriven - or to be more precise, distorted with hard clipping. That's fine. A combination with reverb effect is also fine, it's making some fine dissonances usually find only in field of guitar solos. Sometimes there's a combination of digital delay, sweeping phaser, flangers and whatnot. He overdid it a bit. First of all, it's all too much, bordering hilariousness, and second, it will sound obsolete in a few years, that's for sure, in a same way the reverberated snare and chorused guitars of the 80's are appearing today. Another thing, some of those effects are generic - they remind me of some of the most typical VST presets with little or no twiddling at all.

I spent a whole paragraph about digital effects. I guess that's because I don't have much to say about the actual music, and much less so about the melodies.

James is a good technician. However, the songs here are seriously laking in the department of melody, department of 'something is actually going on', department of GOOD IDEAS.

Save for the very intros, the songs contain no dynamics at all. One, two, three, four, a certain amount of dB that is sustained until the last bar. No quiet passages (at least no quite passages worth mentioning), no change in pace.

Electronic is dull. There's some deep texture of murmuring beneath, and there's a nice momentum of vintage staccato electronic sequence - and that's about it. Artificial rhythm is not the best possible chosen, real-time interventions (or pre-programmed automations) are anything but sublime: no smooth tweaking, just cranking up to eleven, then back to zero and so on.

More or less the same problem is present in the drums department. Chack poom chack poom chack poom. And that's it. I don't mind if someone is not an outstanding technician, but for heavens sake, do change a thing or two if your bandmates are doing the same!! There are a few nice timpani-like, dramatic moments, unfortunately too long and incidental.

In a three words: no, no, no.

I hope, I do hope, in the future, the musicians of this project will slow down a bit, Sudakow will perhaps stop soloing all the time, the songs will get some structure, the band will became more convinced about the areas they want to explore, and people will start to COMMUNICATE and listen to each other while performing as well as breathing.

I will certainly recommend 'Green' to everyone. The 'Green' by the band who took the name after the rapid eye movement.

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