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Originally Posted by Severian
Aaaand... the new Botany's out!
Gearing up for my first full listen.
If this doesn't land in my top ten for the year, that will be a first for Botany. |
Ok so WOW this is not what I expected or wanted at ALL.
Not saying it's bad, but I listened to 5 songs waiting for what I though was just a really long intro to end.
Botany first appeared on my radar because of the incredible worldly, haunting textured beat music they made. It was like Madlib and Amnesiac and Miles Davis all at once. Powerful Fucking stuff.
The second album was not as good as the first but went off in a new direction, channeling hip-hop a bit more directly a la Prefuse 73.
But this .... uhh... this is an ambient mellow electronic album with virtually no beat or rhythm to speak of. Which is fine! I like plenty of ambient electro-shit, but I also own plenty of ambient electro-shit, and so far nothing about this is making me feel like I *needed* to have this album.
The sounds are lovely and contemplative and spacey, but I don't hear any of what made Lava Diviner (True story) such an immediate classic.
In other words, Botany seems to have lost a massive piece of their personality in their attempt to distance themselves from the Madlib, Prefuse and Stereolab comparisons. God dammit.
What an underwhelming experience. I can't think of anything to liken it to... Except... ok, imagine you loved Guardians of the Galaxy because of how full of life and fun and genuinely cool shit was in it... You loved it because, despite being a Marvel movie, of which there are billions, it felt fresh and not at all like just another superhero movie... (Botany's a beat-happy electronic act after all, and there are millions of those, but they managed to make something special within that framework)
So, imagine then that you go see Guardians of the Galaxy II and...
for some fucking reason it's like a 2001 ripoff but with no plot, just a bunch of slow-mo images of the Guardians characters, super up close, or drifting aimlessly through vortexes or some shit... just complete nonsense that has nothing to do with Guardians of the Galaxy, and has exactly NONE of the cool stuff that made the first one special for you!
That's kinda what it's like. And I'm irked because I bought this thing without streaming it first. Such is my confidence that Botany would make something worth buying.
Ugh. Bummed.