Nominated by: Tap
Genres [RYM]: Synthpop, Glitch Pop
Instructions:
If you have not already, please listen to both albums in full before voting. Share your thoughts and/or your vote in this thread. This poll will be tallied in no fewer than twenty-eight days. See Tournament Spreadsheet for the full bracket. _________________ Join us in the canon game :) / Add me on RYM
Daphne & Celeste Save the World may have been marginally more tolerable than the typical representative of it's genre, but that's not enough to save it against the far more interesting Cadu Tenório.
i found cadu tenorio's album a bit disappointing. not a bad record, but i've enjoyed his previous releases quite a bit more.
daphne & celeste gets my vote here, and i hope tap posts his insights here cause they helped me understand the album and appreciate it a lot better. _________________ follow me on the bandcamp.
been busy with moving and stuff but here's a big thing I wrote on D&C earlier and why it is a big one for me
Tap wrote:
An important thing to note is that the album is all produced and written by Max Tundra, except for the Captain Beefheart cover at the end.
I'll try to be succinct (edit: lol), but it's an 18 year story for me now I guess, going back to high school and getting obsessed with Max Tundra - Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be (technically it really got going 17 years ago, sophomore year photo class I had the development chemical process timed out based on where I was at in the album). Then 2 years later, Mastered By The Guy At The Exchange started off his whole synthpop sound (though I guess the Paul McCartney cover is the real start, a version of it without vocals is on SBFYTOTB), and at the time I was actually a little miffed because I saw it as a part of a trend that was bothering me. All these musicians I liked from their instrumental work started adding vocals, probably so that they'd actually be able to play live and survive as musicians now that everyone was done paying for recorded music. Which of course is fair and all but I didn't really see it that way at the time.
And then on top of that the style of the vocals was weirdly proper sounding, like Tundra and the sister he enlisted to do some vocals had an approach where it was sort of like emphasizing pitch like a choir singer instead of bringing out the idiosyncratic vocal character. He has a cover of So Long, Farewell, from the Sound Of Music, and I guess it gets at the cognitive dissonance I feel because I really do hate musical singing and how there's something about how deliberate it is, and there is a connection to this and Tundra's approach to vocals. But yeah, these vocals would sound sort of thin and vanilla in comparison to the vocals that I was all \m/ about. But eventually I came around to enjoying the sound of it and appreciating that he wasn't just going for popularity, but using the synthpop style to push into even weirder and more elaborate compositions than his first one
So then 6 years pass, and he comes out with his next step forward with synthpop. It's just him singing, without any family assistance, but he's gotten a lot better at doing it. It's still kind weird but it's less thin and more confident, more able to nail the hard parts. This step up isn't just limited to the vocals, everything about the album seems improved, more exciting, more details, even more unexpected detours. I'm blown away and left wondering how he could possibly follow it up. The last track's lyrics reference a production of The Holy Mountain on Ice, like the movie, but performed by people on ice skates, presumably singing. Something on that level seemed like the only possible next step, and even though I will always now and forever dislike musicals, I feel like that is something I could get into.
7 years pass. It's 2015, Tundra puts out an album of old stuff from the archives, but there hasn't been anything new. And then I see that there's a video for a Daphne & Celeste song, You & I Alone, written and produced by Tundra. I get super excited! There's a sort of maturity to it, everything has plenty of room to breathe but there's still so much going on. I think "hey maybe now he can actually get at a level of popularity where his art can be done in collaboration with capitalism instead of in spite of it" but it doesn't leave me thinking he's going to be topping Parallax for synthpop. But then enough time passes and the song doesn't really seem to make waves and I think "well that's probably it then".
3 years pass and then this album actually happens and You & I Alone turns out to be an outlier and actually the tracks are crazy busy and make no accommodations for anyone who needs space. It takes the elaborate style of composition in Parallax and brings it into even greater focus, where there's so much stimulation constantly but still a clarity in structure so that with something like 16 Stars, when you get the little bit that happened around 21 seconds in, and then when it comes back in at 1:13, every part of the music that is different on this repetition, the quality of the synths and drums and singing that have changed, that's all completely earned by what the song did to get thru all the 40 seconds between there. And then when it's revealed that the first one was just a tease and this part holds on to the consistency longer, it feels like I'm just slamming down on my brain's dopamine button and it is so amazingly satisfying. And that kind of thing happens a lot on this album. I could go on and on about this like I haven't even talked about how great Daphne & Celeste are at doing Tundra's approach to vocals, but I've already written a lot.
TL;DR, I think this is the high point of a musician I've been paying attention to for more than half of my life and I can totally get how people wouldn't be into this but I've listened to this 18 times since it came out, most recently last Wednesday, and my appreciation for it is only continuing to grow. For reference, my next most listened to thing is 11 times with Jay Glass Dubs & Leslie Winer - YMFEES, which is another thing that a lot of people don't care for but actually is totally amazing. But yeah even with Autechre's NTS Sessions coming out this year, putting Daphne & Celeste at the top of my 2018 list here is an easy call for me and if anything gets above it then this will end up as my favorite year of the decade probably. I've listened to each NTS Session at least 4 times too so it's not like that's not a big deal too because it is.
edit: 19 times now with D&C, writing this up made me want to listen to it again. also I should note that I'm not without complaints on this album. in the skit that opens BB, the part where they say "this is the first thing you figure out when you get a guitar", the end gets cut off a little. that's it tho.
I burnt Daphne & Celeste for our summer vacation and my kids & I absolutely loved it. Tilly's favorite track was Sunny Day tied with BB. Pretty addicting sugar rush.
Wow, that Daphne & Celeste album grew on me so much in a year. I love it now. Several exquisite pop songs, great vocals and production throughout, and the lyrical nerdiness now feels less bothersome.
The Cadu Tenório album is often interesting, especially in its instrumentals and themes. However, it is not at all economical in expressing the concept - 2.5 hours, really? Also, I found it to be overly heavy on spoken word. I felt like I was back in Portuguese class doing comprehension exercises from a recording. It's good, but I don't know when I'll feel compelled to listen again. _________________ Join us in the canon game :) / Add me on RYM
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