Review Summary: another purposeless hour
Some nights, I can’t find the joy in much of anything anymore. This happens from time to time, and I have begun to perhaps give up on trying to beat it. Every hour is marked by mostly disappointment, apathy, etc. Time passes at a constant, impossible-to-grasp state and I’m only really aware of it with deadlines and the pressure of others. I spend a lot of my time just kind of staring at things. Yesterday after laying on a couch in my dorm, staring at a poster of a popstar wondering a host of questions (what would it be like to have that life? why does he wear
those shoes? what do those colors mean?) I realized it had been at least 15 minutes and I needed to do something new. So I got in my bed and did the same thing to the wall. It sounds stupid and meaningless, and maybe it is, but when I feel like this I get more meaning out of it than anything else. Somehow the process of just laying and thinking is the best way to feel some sort of connection to the universe.
That’s what
Music To Draw To: Satellite feels like. Maybe that’s unappealing, and if so, you might as well just stop reading here – you’re not going to like this music. But if the absence of anything sounds gorgeous to you, at times this will too. It’s not that the music meanders pointlessly and randomly like your typical bouncing train of thought, more of a plank of wood just kind of floating along on a calm sea, going wherever the current goes.
Of course, like any Kid Koala record, it meanders a little too long. Some songs, frankly, seem entirely unnecessary. I can only take so much slow echoed voice over looped piano before I get bored. But for the first time in his career, this flaw actually works with the aesthetic of the album. Nobody wants to listen to an overdone turntablism album, just like nobody wants to dance for hours on end to the same song. People do want to listen to an overdone album like this though, where his turntablism skills come in handy to put these songs a few steps above the rest of the crowd. Even if these songs linger on the same thought for too long, that is what
Satellite is about – lingering, thinking, dreaming, drawing.
And while I definitely find myself getting bored of this album, skipping to certain moments and ignoring the rest, I can’t help but think that all music should be like this. Us avid listeners are trying to create a different life with music, one that never gets dull, one with no moments that seem unnecessary. Instead, maybe we should try to just soundtrack the one we already have.
