Melted_Self - Spectral Disorder (GL4ND006)

**T3551ER** · July 23, 2020

Spectral Disorder - the T3 (serious) review

At the outset of 2020, I made a claim that this album was my most anticipated release of the year. This presaged the ongoing pandemic and steady disintegration of my country into what feels like, and perhaps is, a fascist state. How prescient is it, then, that this album, composed well before the current maelstrom of cognitive dissonance generating events, would arrive at just the right time to provide - if not a soundtrack, at least some comfort: there is beauty to be found, even in the chaos of disorder.

While the prior Melted album generated an almost fanciful discursion into futuristic hip-hop (and a likewise flowery review), Spectral Disorder is. . . well, let me back up. It has taken me a long time to write this review, in no small part because what here is dense, complex, and has taken some time to digest. In that way, it holds with all my favorite music - that which is too soon processed tends to be discarded. Things that reveal themselves over multiple listens, over multiple years? That's the where the good stuff lives.

That's not to say that there isn't an immediately graspable musicality here. 0THPLAISS is a banger from the word "go" twisting smeared melodies around an insistent, ever evolving breakbeat, giving way to electronic clicks and beeps, like mechanical insects singing in the night. Dual Sky Pearls follows with a decidedly more ethereal soundscape, mixing stretched vocals a la MHTRTC. It's a hazy, slightly off-key, tuned love affair with the sound of an interstellar highway. Like Daisies, the current favorite (it keeps changing) drops a heavy, liquid bass line matched with impeccable drum programming before giving way to sky lifting melodies around the 2 minute mark (while somehow still maintaining insane drum breaks, rising into the stratosphere around the 3 minute mark, before plunging back to earth, grounded by the original bassline. It goes on like this for another 7 minutes. One could write a whole chapter about this one track.

Assembly required sounds like what would happen if Chris Cunningham created a video of a breakdancing monkey crossed with the Gantz Graf video and then made the music for it. Vocals shift throughout the background like an announcer at an intergalactic truck stop. Guess starts with an almost abrasively fractured beat that later resolves into lurching, oceanic synth line. The whole track evokes an elevator journey into space, travelling through multiple layers of a futuristic cityscape, finally reaching the zenith on some alternate reality space station. The album rounds out with NOSOULBLUZ, a skittering, shaking, head nodder of a track that picks up the excellent drum programming of Like Daisies midway through, before winding it's way through caverns and valleys of glistening, spectral wonderment.

In coming to terms with how this albums sounds, I keep coming back images of Blade Runner, that mix of far future, digital signage writ massive, coupled with industrial decay. Blade Runner (particularly 2049) has both a noir and a detached and almost lamentable take on what it means to be human (or, perhaps, just alive). Like those movies, this album is broad strokes made by fingers of silicon dipped in inkwells of uncreated colors, married with the electronic impulses of a positronic brain learning how to think. It is beautiful, but it also feels a bit mournful (I spent a lot of time listening to this mowing the lawn, which takes about 2/3 of the album all told - I inevitably found myself moved towards a sort of pleasant sadness).

I said this is my most anticipated album of 2020. It still is. It's almost criminal to review this, but if I wait until I've fully, completely digested... well, it'll be some years. This one is worth a listen. To be more accurate, it's worth about 1000 listens, after which you might have some complete appreciation of its complexity and beauty. It might also prove that you're more than just a replicant (or, perhaps, more than just a human).

Edited July 23, 2020 by T3551ER