Reviews by deksametazon

The morning of the day I wrote this review (mid-December), I took a picture of the outside of my apartment in the wee hours of the morning. It had a weird tint to it, almost pinkish, with smog being lower than usual.

The whole atmosphere reminded me of this album: sad, mysterious, and oddly beautiful. It starts off with the 13 minute At Last, which is my favorite track off it, with its emotional and intimate atmosphere, then by the end we have the lulling If I Could See You Again, and the frustrated Spirit in My Hair, which was an odd choice, but totally necessary.

In the end we get a picture into the ethereal and a bit surreal, to be honest. A real emotional album that I recommend everyone give a try if they're looking for some slowcore off the beaten path.

This guy wields a saxophone the same way a lone gunman wields a submachine gun facing impending doom in the wake of overwhelming numbers. It's a shakey performance, but not because of inexperience, but because of fear. He sprays and prays, hoping for something to land across. He knows he won't get them all, and eventually someone will get him, that's the mathematical gist of it, so he closes his eyes and begins 50 minutes of passionate and improvisational sax playing I can only describe as screams of agony as a soldier lives his final moments.

And then the gun falls silent, and all you're left with is darkness and the impression this album made on you.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2025: #6 A Cantopop album from the 1990s (36th Album)

Surprisingly good. It has that mysterious downtempo sound of the 90s that Portishead and Bjork gained popularity from. Fae Wong has a beautiful vocal gift and she uses it well, but it's a shame that the entire thing gets lost in the background, but it makes the background look even more beautiful, nonetheless.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2025: #18 An album released by a VTuber (23rd Album)

Annoying, if you ask me. Nothing of substance here, nor anything that catches my eye, sadly. Every song is the same, ad sounds exactly like an anime opener, over and over again.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2026: #3. A 6th-Generation video game soundtrack (27th Album)

The Silent Hill 2 soundtrack is a better-than-average foray. Most of the tracks manage to stand well on their own, like White Noiz, Forest, Heaven's Night, Angel's Thanatos etc., which shift between altenrative rock, trip hop, ambient and industrial.

But y'know, Ashes and Ghost, Block Mind etc. work only when you're playing the game. And there are a few more examples of ditties like these which make the backbone of the playing experience, but pass my mind pretty quickly when listening to the whole soundtrack like this, but overall it's a great combo of ambient, electronic, and industrial music that makes for an easily distinguishable soundtrack for an incredible game.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2024: #2. An album in an endangered language (30th album)

Some real cool meditative stuff. It gets a bit repetitive and a bit more monotonous as it goes on, but that's the nature of most indigenous music, they aren't supposed to be bombastic and virtuosic, they're supposed to convey emotion, and that's what this album does.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2026: #4. A slushwave album. (23rd Album)

Really uneventful stuff. It's mostly the same ideas recycled over a 30-minute timeframe with a subtle addition every few minutes. Another filler episode in the 2026 listening challenge.

The only semblance of good is the length. For some reason most slushwave albums tend to go for an hour at least. Thankfully, this one stops halfway.

Avant-folk done in a myriad of different ways, with all the circles forming a Venn diagram, with mysteriousness being in the dead center of it.

This one has two women interplaying between themselves with different instruments, creating an atmosphere akin to the birth of a world: at first, it's an empty canvas, but as draws further and further, more colors get added in (or in this case, styles) to create a complete little ecosystem, sustainable on its own.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2025: #20 An album from a Middle Eastern country (3rd Album)

A solid album whose peak enjoyment is blocked by many years of listening to derivatives of Arabic music of varying quality (more bad than good, unfortunately).

A very forward-thinking album, all in all. The presence of jazz influences is a plus, but the songs are generally too long to have an impact on me.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2024: #23 An album from Oman (5th album)

This stuff makes me want to punch a hole in the wall. Not because it's bad, but because it's annoying and reminds me of all the things wrong with the current state of Balkan music.

Bite the pillow and dredge on, I guess.

What an album. Timur Mutsurayev was a Chechen bard who sang mostly about the Chechen conflict, in a way that makes the album enjoyable for us on the outside looking in. Thankfully, I can pick up some meaning thanks to the similarity of our Slavic languages.

Very powerful stuff. Ierusalim is the cut to listen to from this, as it's his most popular song, and probably the best one from the album

When I listened to this last night, I probably said the loudest "of course" when I thought about who made it. Of course, it's the avant-savant noise magician Yegor Letov.

As for the music, I found it a bit tedious to go through, especially the second of the second song. Scary, noisy landscapes of a hellish quality show me an idea, but a lack of knowing a way to express it. Infernal grunting, while scary and ominous, can't do shit on their own.

The two additional songs on the Spotify version are nice and wacky, though, especially the first one. Just because of them, it's a 2.5/5

Gruppa Krovi is the album that catapulted Kino to the front of the soviet rock scene, and what an album to release and have everyone call it a turning point in Russian music. It's catchy, melodic, with a lot of danceable quality, and more importantly to me, it sounds really tasteful and "new".

Viktor's voice is a breath of fresh air, and combined with a lot of memorable bass lines, and natural penmanship is of course a recipe for a good time, regardless of the genre it occupies.

If paganistic forests filled with witches existed in the Balkans, this would be the music they would play. 25 minutes of eclecticism in sound: at times its noisy, at others it's dissonant industrial avant-folk with Nico-esque vocals but sometimes even being... listenable? The thing I was able to extract from listening to this is that some Yugoslavian youths were really inspired and could compete with what the Western world avantists were making.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2025: #3. An album from the Soviet Union before its fall. (30th Album)

This album has it all. Radio Afrika is a surreal frequency-searching odyssey that mixes loads of styles including some laid back reggae, psychedelic folk, new wave and pure rock, all underneath a veil of great poetic energy by BG. The sound is unified by a feeling of melancholy, perfectly intact with the surrounding of living in a state controlled environment.

Past the midway mark it gets a bit stale, mostly due to the experimental nature of song of the songs, but at the end, those final two tracks return it back on track.

From the first minutes, you can already deduce this will be a laughably comical zoomer-core album, and by the end, you'll know that I'm right.

Mmmmm, the sweet sounds of the desert. If you're out here looking for some flashy playing, over-the-top singing, and theatrics, you've come to the wrong place.

Tres Hombres is a laid-back odyssey and a homage to the desolate American highways, featuring simple rhythmic playing and alternating sparse arrangements, like on " Hot Blue " and " Righteous, " or some heavy, rousing tracks like the first three songs.

Side A blows it out of the water with the infectious compositions, while the other side is a bit more meandering (even if it has La Grange). Still, a really great album.

It's not anything devastating in the musical sense of the word, but ZOPP is one of those groups that are somehow closest to the sound of the Canterbury scene from the 70s, perfected by Soft Machine, Caravan, and Gong. That being said, for this very reason I can't give more than 3 stars, because there really aren't enough elements, and wow! factors to be able to say that it is something amazing, but considering the kind of inflated projects that dominate today's music panorama, this is one of those that I can feel at home with.

It's also worth noting that Reality Tunnels surprised me in a positive way. I did not hope for such a triumphant track in 2023, especially not after the slow previous one, Uppmärksamhet.

So I’ll start off by saying that this is one of my favorite albums of all time, and one of the rare, if not the only example of me liking the album from start to finish on my first listen. From the opening of “Care of Cell 44” to the end of “Time Of The Season”, it’s filled with jovial rhythm, beautiful harmonies, and amazing instrumentation.

Now, looking at a few parameters, you’ll see a pattern:

1. Released in the 60s? Check.
2. Is it a sunshine pop/psych album? Check.

And you may think to yourself “Oi, this is just a rip off of what The Beatles or The Beach Boys have been doing for the majority of the 60s!” Ahh, you may be right. But! Did the Beatles or the Beach Boys have Rod Argent taking you on a fucking grand adventure with his organ playing? No. Did the Beatles or the Beach Boys have Colin Blunstone weaving beautiful lyrics that covered love from a whole different view as opposed to the “I love you, you love me” porridge of lyrical shit show from Paul and Brian? Well, on one song yes, but no! No, they didn’t. And that’s what sets this album apart from anything ever done in the 60s psych era. Looking superficially, it’s a run-of-the-mill psychedelic “la di da” album, but deeper down, a dark and hard-hitting manifestation intertwines between the lyrics, shining a new light on life, love, war, friendship, and every in between.

Now, talking a whole paragraph about two musicians here would do no justice to the drummer, Hugh Grundy, who isn’t the flashiest drummer, but, just like the late Charlie Watts, perfectly helped the group achieve musical greatness, Chris White who’s playing on “Hung Up On A Dream” made the song one of my favorites and Paul Atkinson, whose harmonies with Rod and Collin made the album what it is. And also, his bass lines on a few of these songs are as beautiful and memorable as it gets, especially on the closing track.

I’d go as far as to say that this album is better than “Pet Sounds“ and, for that matter, better than anything The Beach Boys have ever put out, and better than most of the catalog of the Beatles. Shame it never got the recognition it deserves when it first came out, for this is one of the crowning achievements of 60s rock.

A+ album, from start to finish.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2023: #24 An album from Algeria (11th album)

A mix of some German electronic progressiveness, tribal rhythms, and African funk vocals that reminisce me of the late Fela Kuti.

Given the right audience, I can see this album being highly enjoyable, but for me, it kinda loses me in its mystery. It's very listenable, but it's mostly just fun ambiental tribe noises that get lost in my head. The third track is probably the most memorable, and my favorite one on here. It's this weird mixture of upbeat funk, electronic drum machines, and this metallic guitar sound that really stands out for being uniquely fast and a bit harsher compared to the rest.