[mickilennial]

[LedZep]

The first synth notes have already won me over. Pure pleasure (in function heh). The opener/intro track is dancing on the edges of sweet, twee-ish indie pop and the more complex baroque pop stuff. It also sounds extremely well-polished, almost sophisti pop style, which I usually dislike but it works like a charm here. It took me some time to recover from that great opener, but in the end, despite rarely reaching the same highs, the whole album's pretty good and consistently fun and catchy. Lovely production, again being almost too polished and perfect, but never crossing the line for me. The synths are extremely tasty and strangely remind me of some 70s prog sounds (perhaps it's just the Van Der Graaf album I've listened to right before this). Jenny's voice is brilliant throughout. Love this chorus:

"I spend my days here working on my concept
Tryna have a good time, turning pages
And what I found is nothing is forever
I'm getting better as I age"

My distaste for generic indie pop of the last 20 years in well documented, but I can absolutely get behind this type of interesting, yet simple sound. High 7.5/10

Let's go with a short and explosive gem from the 90s rave scene, in hopes of starting this thread again. It's just over 20 minutes, give it a go folks.

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Pt. V by Citadel Of Kaos
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Overall chart
Fake overall chart

2020s

[II]

Not even one BEA user could listen to a 20 minutes EP which is on the verge of being approved of being uploaded on BEA since 24/04/2023 ?!?

Well, II'm the right user to listen to this release, since I like releases with less tracks and short length, "less is more" is the right definition to some EPs like these I listen, hence, some of my favorite releases are EPs!

Since no user has posted a review to this EP for one year and almost five months, I took the time to re-listen as much as I can so I would give a review as honest and accurate as possible, therefore, I took a risk of someone else reviewing it before me.

Conclusively, the things I like the most in this EP are the drum samples (they sound great for its genre I believe), the way every track changes it's melody mid-way its runtime, there are no weak tracks and I like the albums structure which a track feels like it sounds better than the previous track (I don't how call that, maybe: "1<2<3<4"), it's a very rare structure in any kind of release, so that's awesome! However, I think the drawbacks for each track are that in their genre's standards (I'm not familiar with it though, so take it as a pinch of salt) their samples repeat a lot, and I usually like tracks which are melodically richer, especially the human voice samples which repeat mostly in tracks 1-2 and a little less in 3, which honestly could work if the runtime of each track was shorter, so tracks like these in a 5-minute average is a bitty bit long, but I don't find these samples that annoying though. The last track is a sort of an exception, since the reverberated chirp samples repeating many times sound better than human voice ones, hence, I believe it's my favorite.

This EP drove me to research more about music that sounds like this, and I believe its genre is Breakbeat Hardcore? It's even written in its Wikipedia article that it was developed in the UK, which is where Citadel of Kaos comes from, and that fact reminded me a Demoscene artist from Gloucester called Vim!, who has composed several compositions on a Protracker in several genres, but composed some Breakbeat Hardcore ones, like this one: Inflatable Dartboard, which feels repetitive, but is shorter around a half in length than the Pt. V tracks and is more faster in tempo which gives more energy and feels less repetitive when its faster, so this one pretty much fits my tastes better.
This EP also drove me to listen Autechre's LP5 for the first time (sounded pretty nice), since I found Autechre mentioned in one Wikipedia article during researching the genre.

To conclude everything: this is probably the best release (which fits my needs) I've ever been recommended by a user so far, so that was a great experience! Thank you, LedZep.

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Now it's my turn to post, so I'll go easy like LedZep, but even easier, because I'll let anyone listen to at least one of three releases, since if it took so long for someone to listen to a 20-minute EP, let's see how long will it take now, lol.
I have to mention that all of them are by the same artist: "Sword of Justice", which is a Japanese power-metal musical project mainly-led by Toshinori Hiramatsu, who is probably one of the greatest video-game music arrangers of all time (he usually arranges everything in the power-metal genre of course) and a very great guitar player who has performed in official video-game tracks. If you've seen me in the forums, you probably know I've been hyping him (and Hyakutaro Tsukumo) several times, and the reason is that Hiramatsu-san is the artist I'm the most comfortable feeling to hype in the forums like that , so I guess he's my favorite artist of all time! At least for the last several months.
His music has everything I like in music: Beautiful complex consonant guitar sounds, melodies and solos and beautiful full-voice female vocals (in case the track is not an instrumental, since most of my favorite music is instrumental).
Sword of Justice songs are probably the most beautiful sounding metal I've ever heard, and I believe it is the most accessible metal music for non-metal listeners, because of these female vocals, and the guitar sound being not too heavy or loud.
I've written extensive infos about each release, but made them invisible for listeners who don't wanna be spoiled and just "blind-listen"(?), but if you wanna read them, just highlight them with the cursor.

Elysion - It's the latest release of Sword of Justice after a 20-year long career of Hiramatsu-san (debuted in 2002). This one is a single, 5-minute long two tracks, the easiest one to listen. This is a release that doesn't fit the BEA criteria, if you want to rate it, so you can listen to it depending of this topic's rules. I usually only listen to singles if they've never been released in an EP, an LP, or even a compilation. And since both two tracks have the best sounding production in any Sword of Justice song, I think no other single can top this as my favorite single of all time! The sounds, melodies & solos in each song are very rich, beautiful and consonant its so unreal! They're definitely two of the best Sword of Justice tracks ever made!

Silver Wings - An 18-minute EP with three tracks. Again, does not meet the BEA criteria. All the tracks are great too. I personally like tracks 2-3 the most: For the power-metal standards, track 2 is unique by being more beautifully soft-sounding synth-based, slower paced and in C Minor key (which gives a very magically mysterious feeling to the tracks), and track 3 is like if Comfortably Numb's solo was a 6-minute instrumental track without its reverb but sounds more dramatic and melancholic which is very awesome to me! Track 1 is great in my opinion, maybe it is kinda slow but it's fun to listen and has great melodies and solo. Tracks 2-3 are two of the best Sword of Justice tracks too, and if this EP could be on BEA, I would give it a 100/100 rating or at least 95/100, so this is definitely my favorite EP of all time!

Beyond the Darkness - Now this is a release that fits the BEA criteria: A 24-minute EP with five tracks. All the tracks sound great. Track 3 is probably my favorite musical composition of all time, for several reasons.

(The reason I didn't post the cover arts is that it would make the post even longer than it already is. You would notice all the cover arts have a girl on them (usually in anime style), and that's because Sword of Justice is a doujin group. Doujin means basically "indie" in Japan, and many doujin releases have an anime girl on the cover, which is some otaku weird stuff, but the art on these Sword of Justice covers is well-illustrated though...)

See you sometime next year I guess lol!