Superorganism — Superorganism ANALYSIS & REVIEW

Published 03/12/2018

This is a very youthful, eccentric, and rather unsettling album that has appreciative creativity but not many big payoffs. The songs were all over the place in their successes and shortcomings, not having one consistent strength throughout despite finding an important, interesting feature most every time. While my final scores ended up rather level for each category, the ride was far from smooth and predictable. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I do wish the music was able to build off of its successes more rather than have them pass by and always turn to something different.

If there was an overall success, it was the band’s obvious spirit, purpose, and energy to create. This music is coated with cheap excitement from its poignant synthetic sound, and in just listening to it on the surface while perhaps doing something else, that’s really all that would come across. It’s not a terrible goal to have, and the band certainly achieved it. Digging in to the musical substance more, though, I see lots of room for improvement. That aforementioned sound may work well on the surface in its blatant energetic drive and bright tone quality, but the large amount of oddities in the effects and long passages of incoherent timbral dominance couldn’t sustain engagement for over a half hour.

I was impressed by the amount of creative ideas put into the timbre from song to song, as it kept me on my toes, but overall those ideas weren’t very convincing or meaningful, such as the many synthesizer bends or vocal octave manipulations. When the timbre was at its best, as in “Everybody Wants To Be Famous” and “Night Time”, it was nothing but a cute, small sound that could never really ignite any intense or important reaction. At its worst, in songs like “Nobody Cares” and “Relax”, the sound lacked real compelling substance from the multitude of weak and annoying transformations, despite living in an appreciative creative atmosphere.

All in all, quirkiness never carries any true strength on its own, although it is inherently better than having no creative drive at all. This wasn’t even a very imaginative work all around, though. While being very flashy, even too flashy, on one end with the sound, the music was also rather undercooked on the other end, which were the melodic lines. For such a frilly, lively work, actual linear ideas were quite stagnant and irregular. They went through patches of interest with a good hook here and there that used a broader shape, again the most notable success being in “Everybody Wants To Be Famous”, but melody was unfortunately the weakest link overall. There was too much reliance on simplistic Mi, Re, Do patterns and not enough compelling rhythm or development to be the pivotal layer the music always needed.

The title track sadly exemplifies all the negative aspects of the album quite plainly. Reluctance was never a problem for this band, as they always seemed to work hard at executing the idea in their mind. The original ideas were either just too wild or too basic to really complete each other and make a substantial impact. These musical minds were active, though, thankfully in some nice borrowed chord usages along with the sonic experiment, and they can certainly improve on their core ideas in the future. This work has some coolness and can easily be appreciated and utilized by the young generation. Beyond that, as its own work, it’s too weak to deserve any repetition.