Lyrics

hello my needle drops Anthony Fantano here the Internet's busiest music nerd and it's time for a review macintosh plus floral shoppe macintosh plus is the pseudonym of a music producer from america and macintosh pluses latest release along with a few others are currently being celebrated as the dawning of a brand-new genre and yes I understand if you're skeptical given the inconsistency of the last three new genres that we've had like C Punk witch house and chill wave but this new genre is vaporwave vapor wave vapor wave vapor wah yes it does sound ridiculous however let's not slag a piece of music simply because of a term thrown onto it because some music fans or music writers are desperate to feel like they're on the cutting edge of something if vapor wave is in fact a genre and does end up being recognized seriously as a genre then it's it's most likely going to just become a sub-genre of plunder phonics sample based compositions songs that take pieces of other songs to build those songs however I'm being told that the artists that are falling under this category of vaporwave are stylistically different from guys like DJ shadow avalanches negative land girl talk as well as John Oswald the man who coined the word plunderphonics and I guess primarily what makes vaporwave different from other plunder phonics styles is its source material many projects in this genre of music that are most notably found on the beer on the rug Bandcamp page stick pretty passionately to using samples from smooth jazz incidental music from maybe commercial television shows from the late 80s late 90s contemporary R&B maybe even adult oriented rock new age music and synth funk as well like the kind of sounds that Brian Eno was creating for Windows back when he was creating the Windows sound and maybe it's music that you've had contact with if you've watched funny videos or TV commercials on everything is terrible calm or even seen a few sketches on Tim and Eric awesome show great job if you're at all familiar with those last two things you know that this kind of music is is constantly made a joke of by a lot of people however there is a growing post-ironic desire to listen to and and wholeheartedly enjoy this kind of music which is just the weirdest thing to me not that it's not enjoyable but it's funny that in the internet age you can pretty much find and listen to anything and almost anything can find an audience and there are plenty of other artists that have made use of the sounds that vaporwave consists of for their own musical gain artists like Neon Indian for example maybe Arial pink as well and and especially an artists like James Ferraro now vaporwave takes this kind of music and manipulates it cuts it loops it maybe pitch shifts it as well and specifically in the case of Macintosh plus it's almost like a chopped and screwed version of all these genres in the source material so again stylistically theoretically not that different from other plunder Phonics artists it really relies heavily on the kind of music it's sampling and the vibe that it gets from that and that vibe consistently from track to track on this LP is smooth synth-heavy kind of sexy the second track on here is a slowed down version of Diana Ross's your move with a few choice grooves in the song cut and looped over and over and over and over until Macintosh Plus finally decides to kind of give up the chorus and the end result with these really vocals crooning out it's just a combination of sweet and eerie it does have a good and kind of interesting sound to it but I have to attribute that more to the songwriting and the way the song was produced as opposed to how the sounds were manipulated because how Macintosh Plus edits a lot of these songs it's it's kind of boring it's it's really uninspired it really lets the song do all of the work it's not like taking a song and turning it into a new song it's really kind of like making a slowdown dance edit of the very same song that you're editing around the middle point of the track there's some slapback echo it gets super slow toward the end but there's really no hint of some very creative loops or cuts on the fourth track Macintosh Plus kind of lets the sample the song rather do the work again it's a revision of the pace song you need a hero which again has a likable sound but is not impressively assembled it's not until the third or fifth track on this LP that Macintosh plus' editing skills actually get used to make a different song out of its source material on track three there are a lot of Skippy loops and edits to kind of build some original grooves out of the samples there's some deep bass and really silky smooth synthesizer and macintosh plus repeats some pivotal parts of these beats in the way a DJ would if the song were being cut live but I really have no assumption that anything on this album is being done on the fly and on the fifth track here all of these synthesizer loops all these piano sounds are taken off of a track and looped placed over one another and just kind of repeated reverb was thrown on top and it becomes a bit of an ambient piece but honestly it was a little underwhelming the only more ambient style piece on this album that I thought was really impressive was the seventh track actually like that from beginning to end the layers of synthesizers on that track got really ethereal and I like the way the saxophone kind of melted through it if anyone is going to be impressed by this LP it's most likely going to be people who have not heard the songs that are sampled on this album first because by sample-based music the editing the looping again just the execution is is really underwhelming leaves a lot to be desired there's nothing on this LP that wasn't done better on an album like Oneohrix Point Never's replica or Daniel Lopatin's other project Chuck Person's eccojams Volume one which samples a lot of the same kind of music and is actually way more bold with its editing and it's looping and it's stretching of some of the songs that it uses aside from being underwhelmed by most of these tracks there were a lot of songs on here that I did not like it all like the opening track where it's basically one section of a song crashing violently into another section that just sounds terrible and just incongruent and on the bonus tracks that come with the latest edition of this album there is a horrible stretched out version of I only have eyes for you the the zapp cover I actually find sample-based music to be pretty interesting I think the possibility is truly are endless but Macintosh Plus is is not even trying to explore a lot of those possibilities and and that's my number one issue with this LP I'm actually feeling a decent too strong for on this album certainly it sounds nice it has style but there's really not much there in terms of how its assembled if you've given this a listen what did you think of it did you love it hate it why what should i review next and that's it Anthony Fantano. macintosh plus, vaporwave forever