The only music review I have ever written was for Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, an album whose first four tracks I then looped for the next four months. This music review is for a very different album, one crafted by the enigmatic Ethan the Robot! during his 2008 summer in Heidelberg. But while it is nearly five years old it is, in many ways, still sealed in plastic. (Plus, I only got it in like September, so it's new to me.) If you want to listen to this album, you can download it off Dropbox here. What follows is my track-by-track analysis capped off with a summary, one I imagine quoted on the album's packaging.
1. My Electro Intro
The album starts with familiar enough Garage Band sound, but soon escalates into a full-fledged diddy— a microwave warm welcome to the album. It would be easy to write this track off as little more than an intro, but by its end it sounds more more like an Introitus to a Requiem than what it claims to be.
2. Mr. Cricket and the Wildflower
This song wins for best title and best story. Clearly a quirky, single man in his early forties has found himself in the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog and, rather than racing through the technicolor landscape, has decided to take a pleasant stroll to enjoy the scenery, even the wildflowers.
3. Blood Red Summer
The title invokes the blood red sun of the Japanese flag, but its sound is more of a lazy summer day on rural Honshu as in scenes of Ponyo rather than the seizure-inducing speed of Tokyo life. Picnicking atop a green suburban hill with a view of the Sea of Japan, the listener can almost taste the Sapporo shandy.
4. A Song I Made
An opaque title for a piece with a wide berth. Background chatter complements the plodding beat nicely as co-workers unwinding at the happy hour of a piano bar. This song is not boring, but is definitely ambient. The evening after a long summer day is preparation for a dark night ahead.
5. I Saw One Bird Eating Another Dead Bird
The cannibalism in this piece is largely psychological and ex post facto. You'll find no flesh rending in the bass clef piano licks, but guilt steadily growing louder. A sapphire light shines through in the end by way of treble piano play.
6. Underwater Radar Gun
While other pieces also spin-off Final Fantasy and Zelda soundtracks, this piece in particular feels like the inside of the Deku Tree in Ocarina of Time. But the Water Temple is also inside the tree, and all the overhead lighting has been updated with clean, white LED bulbs.
7. Morning Rainbow I: The Life of a Baby Dinosaur
You can hear the small triceratops trotting gleefully through the same landscape Mr. Cricket explored in track two. But to this little dino, the land is not to be admired for its detail but rather romped through as an open playground and breathed in rigorously, euphorically.
8. Morning Rainbow II: Rhythm and Instinct
This is mostly a straightforward rock song, even complete with guitar and drum solos. It gets back into the flow of the album near the end, squawking and beating home its electronic point.
9. Morning Rainbow III: The Attack of 2212
I don't know what the world will be like two hundred years from now, nor who would be attacking whom then. But this song foretells swift cavalry, in all their nobility and savagery, descending upon an isolated town. I'm unsure of the exact nature of the force — podracers on laser horses? — but the townsfolk are in deep doo-doo, especially because they can't decide whether to tarry to collect their valuables or to flee immediately. Either way, I don't think it ends well for them.
10. Morning Rainbow IV: Colored Rain
This title truly speaks for itself, and the song unfolds as a fine dessert to what has been a meal of fruit cocktails, raisins and marshmallow fluff.
This album is not only perfect to take a drug-induced mid-morning nap to, but is also a great soundtrack for several hours of data entry. It’s what they played when spring rolled round in irradiated Nagasaki, and it will one day blare proudly from the loudspeakers of Disneyland Mars.
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