Music Reviews

My introduction to Neil’s music was through the emerse praise his last album „Mouth Dreams“ recieved in the music comunity – I found that album to be really enjoyable and succesfull at colliding all those different songs into each other – the mix on that project was surprisingly rich and cohesive and the whole project was overall just a really fun listen. It’s a shame really that I can’t say the same about this new project over here – don’t get me wrong, there are still a handfull of songs that work quite well – but this album is essentially an album of high and lows, where the lows just can just easily take you out of the whole vibe this album goes for. Maybe it’s partially due to the high expectations I had when going into this, but I just found some of the mashups and experimetns on here kinda bland and unintresting. Also in the later half of the album features these weird transitions, where the song just completely cuts off out of nowhere and the next song just starts playing – I don’t know what Neil was trying to do here, but it just comes off as really akward and unfitting.

To take it track-by-track, the opener „Yahoo“ is actually a really nice kick off to this album – the spacy synth-orianted production works quite well and it sets the mood just right. After the short-winded „Mouth Dream – intro“, that doesn’t really add anything to the expirience, we get the next song „Sponge Rock“, which is just absolutely hillarious – in a good way though. It’s a combination of the Spongebob Squarepants theme song with Queen’s „We Will Rock You“ and even though it’s a little rough around the edges, it just comes off as really funny. The follow up „Just a Baby“ is easily one of my favorites here – it’s a really well constructed ballad featuring the classic 2000s rock tune „The Reason“ by Hoobastank and vocals from the Johny Cash classic „Folsom Prison Blues“ with some additional vocals/instrumentation from Justin Bieber and MGMT. It really plays into the whole aesthetic of this album and comes around full circle by the end. „Superkiller“ is a funky banger with the sample of the 80s classic „Super Freak“ by Rick James, with the additional Can’t touch this vocal lines we all come to know over the years and the absolute bagner of a song that is „Psycho Killer“ by Talking Heads. But from here is where the album starts to get really forgetable – except the intresting sample choice, the next few songs are just not that remarkable. The album looses momentum quick and there are only couple highlights in the later half. There are some cool ideas here and there, like the mix of Foo Fighters and Aerosmith on the song „Aerolong“, or the amayingly-titled „Where is my Mom“, which as the title suggests features „Where is my Mind“ by Pixies and Fountains of Wayne’s „Stacy’s Mom“, but both of those song have a runtime of an interlude and have those exact weird transitions I was talking about before – the ideas are great, but the executions is just not there (which basically sums up the album pretty well). One of the highlights later on though is definetly „1000 Spoons“, which features one of the wildest combinations of songs here: Black Sabath’s „Iron Man“, Alanis Morissette’s „Ironic“ and the Knight Rider theme? As ironic as it sounds, this is actually one of the most well-put-together songs here and offers a really nice and intense change of pace from the other poorly mixed and just downright boring cuts here. The album finnishes of with the super unintresting „Ain’t“, which for some weird reason just feels very weirdly paced and kinda anticlimactic – which is everything that a closer shouldn’t be.

So yeah, this one is kinda middle of the road for me. If I had to give this album something, it’s that it stills is one of the better examples of mash-ups in proffesional music scene – but as I said before, the weird transitions, boring songs, the slow pace of the album and just the execution overall is what brings this album down from me. I still found it to be somewhat of an enjoyable record, but it’s far from the quality of it’s predecessor.

decent 5/10