SOPHIE — Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides ANALYSIS & REVIEW

Published 06/19/2018

This is a gray area where music review can get pretty difficult. It’s unfortunate that I will come across as rather negative to a work that is so obviously filled with personality and uniqueness, since that’s ultimately an enriching path to take in this postmodern age. This album also shows, though, that it isn’t enough to just stand out, which is where it goes wayward in this postmodern age.

No matter how much thought, detail, or personal expression goes into a work of art, especially music, aesthetics within the artistic elements themselves are the core of its worthiness and existence. That’s just my opinion, but it’s an opinion that has essentially shaped the music world over the last 60 years and the main reason behind the failure of modernism and the rise of postmodernism. I’m assuming that most everyone listening to new music today takes that as a positive, so no need to go further with that.

Despite its amount of pure surprise, this album has a rather weak aesthetic core. Since there are ever-growing advances and opportunities to create new timbres today, this music gave an awful lot of attention to sounding like something never been done before with overly-extravagant industrial sounding synth tones having unprepared entrances and a complete alien-like delicacy in chordal synths and vocals. The sound was set up to be the most compelling factor and biggest pull into this music, with most every other musical decision merely revolving around the created sound.

However, overwhelming does not equal compelling, and unexpected does not equal quality. Much of the sonic experimentation ended up being quite an ear sore with no higher purpose behind the oddities in sonic manipulation but to be shocking and different, and therefore unsubstantial. One can appreciate the process all they want, but some of the end results here were very annoying, sounding like a monster working on an assembly line in the song “Ponyboy” or a snoring pig in the song “Not Okay”.

In one word, I’d describe the timbre as “distracting”. It overshadowed the entirety of the musical direction but gave no real expansive meaning beyond trying to make the listener say “wow”. Some listeners may take that “wow” factor as being what makes this music worthwhile, but it’s really just a “wow” from surprise, and it’s not a worthwhile goal to only build to that and not to something more emotionally substantial and unexplainable.

What the timbre could’ve used, aside from a sound quality not built solely on surprise, was less restraint based on structural song composition, such as the obvious simple meters, the motivic repetitions, and the typical pop style harmonic rhythms. This shaped the sonic exploration into one large box being added onto the structure, rather than being the actual structure itself. As a result, sonic space was not used to the fullest, and these songs only came to be an assortment of heavily manipulated, aggressive points amidst a lot of emptiness and useless silence.

There wasn’t any great linear melodic engagement or background development, since the element meant to provide the entirety of engagement and development fell flat in its lack of dimension. There are two songs that were outliers to basically everything I’ve explained so far. The track “Pretending” was the only one to use space well, and was also the most tame in sonic additions, having some nice slow growth to the sound that finally allowed the album some room to breathe and have a sliver of purposeful emotional connection.

Right after that comes the only decent track on the album, “Immaterial”, which stuck out like a sore thumb in its dismantling of musical priorities from sonic surprise to melodic kernel. That was quite an important switch, as this song was catchy, fun, directive, and interesting on multiple levels thanks to a tight melodic motive paired with an energetic yet not necessarily obtrusive synth layer. The best part about it was the simple vi-V-I-IV progression with a compelling rhythmic pattern and layered bass/synth delivery. I’m not surprised that the song with the least amount of timbral experimentation was the best, as the experiments found on this album were simply not engaging or artistically crafted for a higher purpose.

This hits a wall that many musicians of the modernist era also used to hit, which was the lack of sustainable proportion between personal expression and listener experience. The overall expressiveness was rather interesting and at least gave off a feeling, even if that feeling was straight uneasiness. There was simply no higher, more important emotion to connect the listener with. If this album resonates with you, I’m happy to let you know that there’s a goldmine of musical creations with similar results like this from the previous musical era.

There was a reason that those musical mindsets died out, though. Perhaps this example is just a bit more sonically interesting comparatively thanks to technological advancements. For those who are well-experienced have listened to a wide variety of music in different styles and eras, you know that there is plenty of better stuff out there that combines avant-garde expressionism with grasping emotional attachment. The song “Immaterial” really saves me from calling this album a failure. The music isn’t awful, but heads and priorities weren’t in the right places here. The album’s only reason for existence was not successful enough for a full listen, and there are lots of better examples out there.