After The Magic (studio album) by 파란노을 [Parannoul]

From viquel 03/10/2023 21:57

A wintry take on shoegaze’s trademark blanket of fuzz, a frosty breeze numbs your cheeks and water-coats your eye before unfolding into a milky glittery cushion of stardust. Reading through the lyrics confirmed what the music itself, as well as the cover art, suggested: a high emphasis on images; rough waves, the night sky, the cold moonlight, silhouettes of friends, all blurred in a glare of white light, memories suspended in wistfulness.

Never heard of these guys before but really glad to have come across this.

Yes! I was blown by this record. Sounds Inside Me, Waves inside You is an amazing song. Such a beautiful shoegazy album

Early contender for album of the year. Parannoul keeps getting better and better each album.

A beautiful album. The pretty melodies that turned into existential chaos were entrancing. My favorite album I’ve heard this year.

First time listening to Parannoul, and it most definitely won't be the last time either after this. A fantastic blend of Korean pop and climactic shoegaze. Great Album that will be vying for my AOTY for sure.

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From Arthurknight 01/31/2023 03:18

If there exists a person who simultaneously has heard the term "5th Wave of Emo" and thinks it's not arrived, they surely do now.

"Dream-pop" never went out of style per se, but it has become an increasingly amorphous definition. A term coined by one of Shoegaze's few POC artists has come to cover a wide and stale range of sounds including
fascistic hypnogogic pop, vaporwave's most populist work and Mac DeMarco inspired college-dorm cover bands. This sterile take on dream-pop was not limited to the periphery though as the worst clichés of 2010s Indie were the out-of-the-box Logic 10 digitally applied hall reverb and an emergent market (or hellscape) of boutique "dreamy" pedals hundreds of dollars a pop.

Perhaps in part a rejection of the above garbage, the last few years has seen a surprising resurgence of interest in niche 90s shoegaze outfits. Bands like Lush, Here, Blueshift Signal, Swallow, Cranes, Moose (I could go on endlessly), are all finding new listeners off the back of vinyl re-releases and Spotify algorithmic encouragement. Shoegaze has not seen this much interest since the late 00s forums days.

Amidst this revivalist moment, Parannoul blew up online with the album To See the Next Part of the Dream – the first fresh sounding act in years (Ironically he did so off the back of YouTube more so than any other platform, the once quintessential place to find bland dream-pop played over French-New Wave films). Despite its crunchiness and repetitiveness, To See the Next Part of the Dream is mesmerising and innovative; an imminently self-justifying work of art.

However, rather than part of the mostly white, mostly industry backed wave of DIIV copies calling themselves "shoegaze", Parannoul always felt to me closer to the emo-adjacent hyper-pop influenced noisepop artists active on bandcamp like Weatherday, Gammagirl and be your own virtual pet!. These artists are independent, faceless/monikered, queer and, while embodying many of the self-deprecating hallmarks of emo, are far more animated and jubilant-sounding than any emo we've heard before. I don't entirely love the idea of calling this "post-emo", but it deserves to be named.

After the Magic is all you need to hear to be convinced that this bloc of artists constitute not just the vanguard of emo today, but are a wholly new movement in-and-of themselves. Polaris is maybe the best single song Parannoul has put out (as hard as that is to decide). Insomnia is a revelatory re-working of Downfall of the Neon Youth, lowering the skittish frenetic free-drumming of the first version in the mix and making everything else softer and gentler; Insomniacs dream too. Arrival is maybe the biggest sounding song on the project, finding a way to become immense while still sounding graceful. the penultimate Blossom also deserves special recognition as a truly textbook representation of Parannoul's ability to make anew the anthemic emo bops of the 00s.

I think a false dichotomy has emerged between this record and Parannoul's breakout sophmore release: the first is open and honest about the depressive horror of our capitalist realist present and this new record hides in dreams ("It's more mellow"). The problem is To See the Next Part of the Dream was never especially depressive, it just came out during a global pandemic. Go back and listen to it now and you'll see the exuberant and exultant turn was always where this new generation were going, and good for them. Go transcend!

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