Review Summary: ❤
It’s difficult to find pre-2015 reviews of vaporwave albums devoid of terms like “corporate”, “pop culture”, “consumerism”, “80s nostalgia”, and the like. I’d argue the best post-2015 albums of the sort don’t yield obligatory buzzwords as such, and push the genre beyond reactionary appeal into a broader purview, and minus stale irony. death’s dynamic shroud.wmv have gained attention for doing just that, and
Heavy Black Heart warrants dissection. Subsequent to 2014’s marathon of monthly dds.wmv releases, 2015’s
I’ll Try Living Like This established the group like a summit flag, cementing them as mainstays within the vapor niche. Their newest effort is brimming with ideas most contemporary glitch pop, post-industrial, and sound collage producers wish they had in their arsenals. It’s fitting that
Heavy Black Heart sees itself among Orange Milk’s repertoire, as the label is on the forefront of experimental music of such ilk.
There’s almost a sly sense of foreboding in the album’s conceptual headwater. Thematically,
Heavy Black Heart is based both on the pangs and the gradual aches associated with losing relevancy over time - interesting, considering they have proven both their relevancy and future potential in the eyes of many as of late. This sense of theatric uncertainty underpins much of the album. “Life Should Be Easy”, evidently, embodies this. The smooth bossa nova instrumentation erupts, giving way to anthemic cries of wonder and blissful helplessness, like Bleachers' “I Wanna Get Better” of another colour. "My Turned-Off Phone” calls to mind Clarence Clarity sonically, and mimics the dramatized ‘awakening’ one might envision for themselves should they - theoretically, of course - unplug. “You At Night” could be the soundtrack of suspicion upon discovering a loved one leading a clandestine second life when the sun sets. The track is dark, eerie, and nervous; but, it’s also sexy, and drenched in drug-addled excess.
Many of the song titles allude to well-worn conceptual tropes. Within, we find things much more labyrinthine and unpredictable.
Heavy Black Heart demands heavy mileage. “Nothing Like This World”, for example, has a somewhat simple framework: longing, fantasy, embellishment, and so on. With each listen, however, the narrative structure gets more challenging to unwrap. Step One would be deciding whether the protagonist is
here dreaming of
there, or
there acting as ambassador for
here. (After a dozen listens, I’m still unsure, so I have my work cut out for me in figuring out the rest.) Often, the instrumentation of
Heavy Black Heart turns on a dime, with purposeful detours that throw for a loop without sacrificing fixation. “Pennington Acres” bounds off the preceding “You At Night” hilariously, shifting the narration from the suspicious to the suspected, as though to affirm every paranoid intuition with a galloping electronic drive that careens through crowded alleyways at life-threatening speeds, amidst smoke and sirens. The track could not pull a tighter 180 at its midpoint, blossoming into piano-fuelled fanfare. dds.wmv do tongue-in-cheek better than most, which is to say they do it rarely, and they make it count.
I’m inclined to say that
Heavy Black Heart is dds.wmv’s most complexly personal outing yet, but that promise would be contingent upon the listener stumbling through it whilst retracing my exact steps. The album is ambiguous enough that to call it 'more personal’ is a crapshoot, like calling one kaleidoscopic visual arrangement more psychedelic after several minutes of knob-twiddling. Further, to call it complex is oversimplifying things (kinda). In asking one of the producers about some of the samples used, his response was, “
If you're hearing something, then let it just be that.” It’s a bit counterintuitive to look at such dense sound collage and not dismantle it - the real challenge is to read it at face value. Let that also serve as an excuse for not exhaustively detailing the various sounds. Rest assured, there is plenty of variety in rhythm, texture, and genre manipulation, and this review doesn’t need four more paragraphs as it is. I’ll say this:
Heavy Black Heart isn’t one of those albums that *suddenly clicks* when the right stars align and the puzzle falls into place. I predict that it will make sense in bits in pieces, and will also cease to make sense in bits and pieces.
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