Exploration 84 - Waveshaper (2015)
On the blog, where you can see the various tags I’ve attached to my posts, I’ve put this this under “vaporwave.” I know it isn’t, really, but that’s sort of the catch-all I’ve used for the nostalgia-heavy musical threads of the early 2010s that re-work older cultural tropes into something modern and post-ironic.
This is a great example of the “synthwave” style of this weird 21st century underground. It’s basically leaning into what made the synth-heavy electronic movements of the 80s so cool, a sort of soundtrack for a shitty 8-bit video game that never existed.
It does sound a bit un-serious on its surface, like it’s just playing with old equipment to be cheesy. But you don’t have to listen very long to start catching the song structure and attention to detail that make this a very listenable record.
Steady rhythms that veer from pop to industrial to modern electronic, recognizable choruses, and great dynamics all contribute to something that’s definitely tongue-in-cheek but is also quite ambitiously tuneful.
