Music Reviews

So… This new The Garden album? Well… It’s alright lol.

Now that we got the unnecessary suspensful intro out of the way – this New Garden album is actually quite good. I was originally dreading the release of this thing as I did not really enjoy any of the teaser tracks the band put out for this thing – the sort of forgetable „Freight Yard“ was just okay, Orange Country Punk Rock Legend was, at least at the time just too goofy and all over the place (a quality of the song which I know funily enough enjoy) and „Chainsaw the Door“ didn’t leave much of an impression either (although that is like my top 3 song from this album now)- needles to say, my expectations were really low for this new album. My fears were further confirmed once the actual album came out and 4 songs in I had yet to really necessarily enjoy anything – that luckily broke once the fifth song, the title track, kicked in and it felt like I was listening to a whole different project – from here on out things did fortunately turn for the better (although nothing really managed to top said title track).

To dissect this album more in depth we have the opener „Haunted House on Zillow“ which is only a minute long and still manages to be too long for its good – credit where credit’s due, it sets the tone for the first few songs and I guess the rest of the album pretty well, however that doesn’t mean the song itself nor the tone is all that pleasant. The followup „Oc93“ has a solid punk aesthetic and an okay chorus, however that’s literally like the only thing the song has going for it – it really feels longer than it actually is which usually in The Garden songs it’s the other way around. ¨Puerta de Limonisa¨ exists just to fill in the runtime, removing the song changes zero things with the album. ¨Freight Yard¨ is still kind of a meh song, that’s like the one single which I’m still not super crazy about. As I said alredy the title track ¨Horseshit on Route 66¨ has no business going this hard especially after the mixbag that is the first few song of this album. ¨What Else Could I Be But a Jester¨ is a decent followup to the last song, mainly because it doesn’t go for the same formula the first 4 song go and switches things up for a more harsher distorted electronic sound that really reminds of their last album which is probably the best compliment I can give this song. Just wish it was longer. The next song ¨X in the DIrt¨ kind of reminds me of the first 4 songs but for some reason this one actually works. Don’t really have much else to say about it, fairly decent. ¨Orange Country Punk Rock Legend¨ sticks out in this album like a sore thumb but it’s just so goofy that it works. ¨Chainsaw the Door¨ is a song that grew on me probably the most – the melody is super fun and the song is just super nice to the ears, the guitars with the electronics mix really well together and it’s overall just a pleasant listen. The last two tracks ¨Squished Face Slick Pig Living in a Smokey City¨ and ¨At the Campfire¨ are both decent. The former of the two having a pretty decent atmosphere and serving as an okay transition into the last track, which maybe isn’t the most ear-catching song of the album but still manages to wrap things up nicely making the album feel like a whole expirience (plus I enjoy the 2 second freakout on which the album ends).

So yeah, not much else to say here, if you enjoyed The Garden up to this point (especially their earlier work from what I’ve been told) then you’re probably gonna find some level of enjoyment out of this.

-favorite tracks: title track, What Else Could I Be But a Jester, X in the Dirt, Orange Country Punk Rock Legend, Chainsaw the Door, At the Campfire

-least favorite tracks: the first four with the exception of maybe Oc93

Light 7/10

It finally clicked.

4 months. That’s how long I was trying to get into this album, but for some reason just couldn’t. I was going crazy – everyone around me was calling this the easy album of the year and I was just sitting over here not understanding the hype at all. But today that changed – I finally just sat down and listened to it, no pre-judgements, just turn all my attention to the music and it’s meaning – and it was at the 5th track „Ground Zero“ where this record just suddenly made complete sense. You see, this album doesn’t make NO sense whatsoever, BUT THAT’S WHY IT WORKS. This album really makes you question what even music is. It doesn’t try to follow any musical formulas, it doesn’t follow basically any genre restrictions, it just does what it wants and that is to musically express grief – grief is the main focus of this record and the hardships and struggles that come with loosing someone really close to you. The feeling of how the world just keeps spinning even though you still haven’t dealt with your loss – all of that becomes apparent on track seven, „Top Picks For You“, AKA the first, and probably also the last, glitch hop song to ever make me break down into tears. Once you get to this point in the album there is no turning back, everything just clicks, but it’s not an easy journey to get there – the opposite in fact. The world that the album creates through it’s music is dark, glitched, fundamentally broken and just incredibly tough to swallow. There is constantly this paranoid feeling that something is a little off and that feeling haunts you throughout the whole listening expirience. And what an expirience it is, I don’t think any album this year has made me so just… emotionally drenched. Now I personally never lost anyone that I was super emotionally tied to, so for me, I can’t even IMAGINE how horiffying of an expirience that must be, but if it’s even half as bad as this album’s sound is portraying it to be, then good god. It’s hard to talk about each individual track here, because the expirience works as a whole and taking individual tracks out just isn’t how this album is supposed to be listened to – it’s a journey through the grieving mind, a painful f***ed-up journey, that ends on a somewhat of a hopeful note, in the form of the song „Bye Strom“. This song says to the listener to keep their head up, that even though that someone else’s journey came to an end, doesn’t mean your own does too, even if that person was super imporant to you – „the show must go on“. And even though it may take weeks, months or hell even years, eventually, you will move on. It doesn’t try to downplay the grieving process, it let’s you very well know that it will be incredibly difficult and painful – but not impossible.

Now I got a little too introspective there, but it’s crucial to undestand all of this in order to truly appriciate how powerful this record really is. The music’s dark, it’s distorted, it doesn’t make no sense in some places, but it’s clear that it’s all calculated and intentional, I haven’t heard a depiction of grief this accurate since I think „A Crow Looked At Me“. Some key tracks would be the opener „Outside“, which is an ambitious opener that really lets the listener know, that what you’re about to hear is nothing short of insane, both singles „Knees“ and „Superman That“, the first of the two being one of the more accessible tracks on the album, while the latter being funnily enough one of the least accessible ones and also the track „Footwork in a Forest Fire“ which is honestly kind of beyond words, it’s one of those things where you gotta expirience it to truly understand it – that also kinda goes for this whole album to be honest.

… s**t. I mean this album broke me. I can’t even put into words what this music does to you, but it’s really something to behold… Anyways yeah, I see the hype now lol (also I realise this probably should have been a disclaimer at the start of the review, but I usually like to keep the swears out of my reviews, but with this one I felt like it really helped to express how truly just f***ed this album is).

10/10

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