RANDOM REVIEW #5: SYNTHWAVE (200?)
Q: Wither goest thou, America? In thy shiny car in the night? A: Caaaaliforrrrnia
Alright, so this post is gonna be a little bit more personal than it should be, but I don’t give a fuck, and neither will you if you get through it. It’s a post about synthwave, but it’s also a post about my childhood. And I spent large swaths of my childhood playing on the railroad tracks, playing video games, and watching the same few movies over and over.
I’m trying to figure out my fascination with American desert iconography despite having never been there, and I’m starting to realize it can be pinned down to a scant few different movies. The first film is The Wizard (1989), which is less a film and more a two-hour advertisement for Super Mario Bros. 3, whose opening scene begins with a kid walking down a desert highway. A brief shot of his POV shows light over the mountain ranges, a ridiculously picturesque sunset.
The kid cuts a minuscule figure, totally dwarfed by the vast geological indifference of the Great American Southwest. His name is Jimmy and he’s walking to California to find his sister, who drowned two years earlier under his supervision, a death eerily similar to what happened to California author William T. Vollmann.
The film does not make it clear whether Jimmy is aware of the finality of his sister’s death. I think that, for Jimmy, death is a place you can go, like California. Which might explain his manic drive to get there. Years later, when I saw the opening scene of Nebraska (2013), it was obvious to me that it was a homage to The Wizard, with a cop stopping a monosyllabic/silent traveler on a quest that means something only to him, and which therefore cannot be explained.
“There’s something inside you. It’s hard to explain.” - Kavinsky “Nightcall”
One of the things I love about American artists is how willingly, hell even delightedly, they reference their progenitors. Check out the movie poster for Nebraska:
Okay, now check out the front cover of Bruce Springsteen’s haunting, minimalist album Nebraska (1982).
Coincidence? Nah.
Anyway in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Bruce Dern gets pulled over and sent home, just like Jimmy in The Wizard, who is caught not three miles out of town. Neither cop from the opening scenes of Nebraska and The Wizard seem like your classic American Authority Figure From Movies; they are just regular nice dudes. The latter seems more interested in whining about his marriage than beating young Jimmy up or “running him downtown.” Check it out yourself below:
Cop: Woah! Woah son. Now just where do you think YOU'RE goin, boy?
Jimmy: CALIFORNIA
Cop: Sure kid. We all wanna go to California. My wife wants to go to California.
Dispatch tells the Highway Patrol Officer to take Jimmy back home to his mother’s apartment, where Jimmy hates living, so he plots his next escape. Whether his parents realize it or not, he’s gonna get to California.
Please don’t laugh (okay, go ahead and laugh) but the next film that influenced me, and fuelled my romanticization of being unhoused and traveling by night and sleeping under overpasses, is Free Willy (1993).
Now, Free Willy has been misremembered by a lot of people. It’s a much darker film than people think, depicting both child homelessness and domestic violence with a kind of banal, fly-on-the-wall objectivity. Indeed, Jesse is wise beyond his years. I love the scene where he shocks his foster parents by asking for black coffee during their first breakfast together as a foster family.
I know I bitch a lot about how people seem not to remember things, as I did in my post about Chris Cornell and how every MSM outlet posted fucking “Black Hole Sun” instead of the ten or twelve more appropriate songs about suicide Soundgarden had recorded.
There has been a similar partial cultural recall with Free Willy, whose opening scene shows a bunch of homeless kids in Portland, Oregon (with hearts of gold beneath their tough exteriors, natch), stealing food from a restaurant patio before hitting pay dirt: a cake company delivery van that has left its back door open! FREE CAKE!
Portland is also the setting for the movie that rekindled my fascination with street characters as I entered my adulthood, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) which, unlike Free Willy, is a unrelenting and beautiful masterpiece.
And Jack Kerouac’s On the Road romanticized railyards and hitchhiking when my Dad gave it to me for my 16th birthday, so any time in my life when my enthusiasm for the romanticized idea of homelessness began to flag, some movie or book or music video would come along and my fond feelings for being unhoused and free would come rushing back.
^ Me trying to thumb a lift on the Trans-Canada Highway about 20km outside Brandon, Manitoba in August 2007.
First it was Free Willy and The Wizard that made me crave the hobo life. Later on it was Gas Food Lodging (1992) and On the Road (1957). I didn’t see homelessness as a manifestation of desperation or a reaction to domestic violence. I saw it as the ultimate form of freedom.
Having been actually homeless at various points in my life, I see now just how insanely wrong my privileged thinking was. I thought homelessness would be non-stop action and fun. Instead it feels much more like waiting for a bus that never comes. But I still have that golden California idealized version of it in my head, like a found shard of a mirror.
Music videos like Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” and Charlie Major’s “Nobody Gets Too Much Love,” both released in 1993, only strengthened my resolve to one day live in the great outdoors of the American Southwest. The Soul Asylum video begins with the statement (which couldn’t possibly have been true) that in 1993 there were “over one million youth lost on the streets of America.”
According to Charlie Major, a Nashville country recording artist from Quebec, which is an odd combination, “[a] nation of young has taken to the streets/looking for somewhere they can call their own/they’re running against their will they’ll say/trying to find a home…”
Anyway, Free Willy sees Jesse sent to a foster home and given a job at a local marine park. I think because he vandalizes the place with spray paint earlier in the movie, back before the cake-stealing incident. This is the part of the film people remember; Jesse making friends with a friendly whale who he then tries to release from captivity. But I never related to those marine park scenes. I related to the street scenes. I wanted to live under an overpass, eating cake.
At one point in Free Willy, after Jesse has turned himself around, he runs into Perry…one of the homeless youths Jesse was running with at the beginning of the film. Perry hands Jesse a postcard (think of them as pre-Internet Instagram posts, those of you born after 9/11) and tells him he’s headed for California. He asks if Jesse wants to come along, if he “has the guts.”
Watching the movie at nine years old, I was screaming at the screen, imploring Jesse to go to California. Which of course he does not do. He has to stay in Portland so the film can have its iconic whale jump scene. Meh. I prefer the Director’s Cut shown on The Simpsons:
I’m not trying to position myself as The Great Rememberer here, but why is Michael Madsen remembered only as the psychotic Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs (1992) when he also played the understanding foster father to the troubled Jesse in Free Willy, a film that made $150 million more than Tarantino’s debut?
“I was the Dad in Free Willy for God’s sake!” - Madsen, understandably frustrated, about being typecast
He was also Susan Sarandon’s ill-tempered but ultimately understanding partner in Thelma & Louise (1991). But nobody remembers that either.
I don’t know how this all connects, but it does. In my brain, at least. It’s not like there aren’t consistencies, dots to be connected, patterns to be prodded at and dragged into the neon electric light of the glitziest, cheesiest decade.
First of all, everybody wants to go to California. California serves the same purpose as Jack Kerouac’s mystical West, or the Vikings’ Valhalla. But for there to be a heaven, there must be hell too, which is where videogames like Streets of Rage came in, harnessing the public’s taste for fighting back against street crime. Only in the 1980s could a man like Bernhard Goetz be taken seriously in his run for mayor of New York City.
Not until years later did the media, now populated by a different generational cohort, begin to seek out the now grown adults who’d been shot by Goetz and got their side of the story. Whether you believed them or not, they had a right to tell their respective versions, a subway Rashomon (1950).
Which is where synthwave comes in. Hypnagogic pop. Whatever you wanna call it, it all comes from the Cocteau Twins “The Itchy Glowbo Blow.”
Synthwave started as an audio/visual project meant to mine and mimic the sonic tendencies of the 1980s, not just the cheesy stuff; yacht rock too. Not just UHF (1989); Wall Street (1987) too.
There are glimpses of urban blight in the above Soul Asylum and Charlie Major videos, and also in Free Willy and The Wizard. You can see the same kind of thing I mean in Dennis Hopper’s trailer situated in the downtown of some anonymous American city in True Romance (1993). You can see it in Showgirls (1995).
This was the America I hoped to disappear into one day. I didn’t care if it would perhaps lead me to ruin. Which is probably why I’m sitting where I’m sitting today, with rent due tomorrow and $200 short because my job got cancelled again. Fucking COVID…that’s three times now.
There is a short scene in Donna Tartt’s sprawling third novel The Goldfinch where Theo’s father has died and Theo, having been through this before, knows that child services are en route and he has to run away immediately before they get him and take him somewhere he won’t want to be. He implores his friend Boris to come with him.
“I want to go someplace warm,” [Boris] said instantly. “California…[i]t’ll be fun. We’ll stay high all the time - read books - build camp fires. Sleep on the beach.”
(Again with the fires? Guys…cops investigate fires. Stop with the fucking fires.)
“All right,” I said - knowing full well I was stepping off the edge and into the major mistake of my life, petty theft, the change cup, sidewalk nods and homelessness, the fuck-up from which I would never recover.
[Boris] was gleeful. “The beach, then? Yes?”
This was how you went wrong: this fast.
Anyway, back to the music. So, as video games gained a foothold in the imaginations of my generational cohort, the soundtracks of the games began to worm their ways into our subconscious, so that years later, when synthwave came along, people responded to it with surprising emotion, with the exaggerated fondness of nostalgic reaction.
One of synthwave’s biggest artists, Marvel83’, has a fantastic video titled “Back to the 80s" and her Bandcamp bio claims the following:
Let me take you back to carefree childhood. Where the colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning after the rain fragrant than ever... [sic]
Note the American style spelling of “color” despite Marvel83’ being from Prague, Czech Republic. I guarantee she chose that deliberately to better convey that sense of Cold War American exceptionalism, the Back to the Future, Marty McFly U.S.A.
Some sample song titles: “Venice Beach,” “Lost Highway,” “Westlake High ‘85,” “NYC Sunrise.” Am I crazy or can you feel the connection here? Highways, deserts, open spaces, the power of possibility in the first bloom of youth, not power for its own sake. A permanently embedded cultural nostalgia for a time that never was, and a place that never existed…
The first synthwave artist I ever heard was Com Truise. It was an auspicious first experience, given the modus operandi of synthwave: to take the sights and sounds and sonics and atmospheric moods of music and consumer culture of the 1980s. Who better to represent the overachieving white dude yuppie kid of the 1980s than Tom Cruise and his iconic sliding across a hardwood floor in Risky Business? And what better way to show that your intent is to disrupt and remix and fuck around with that aesthetic than by deliberately fucking up his name?
So Com Truise was my first taste of synthwave, but…as with a lot of the modernist poetry and postmodern theory I’d read in University, reading about the movement’s figures and ethos was often more fun than experiencing its artifacts. If you find yourself fascinated by Ezra Pound’s insane life story but you’ve never bothered with his poetry, than you don’t like modernist poetry. You like biography. That’s me. I’ve never read his Cantos and I don’t plan on it. When an artist is known more for something other than his/her/their art, that artist has failed. Pound is known more for his anti-Semetic radio broadcasts in WWII and his support of fascism than for his writing. I can’t recite a single line of his. I don’t know what he’s written. But I know he hated Jews and loved Mussolini.
So for me, what Com Truise were doing was more interesting as an idea than in its execution. Its disruption was more interesting than the listening experience was. Synthwave, to me, seemed more of an art project than a movement with any kind of meaning. Then I heard Power Glove.
Named for the earliest form of wearable tech, what Power Glove has done isn’t brilliantly original, but they are undoubtedly the best at what they do, which is writing midi-heavy soundtracks for video games that never existed. “Streets of 2043” is brilliant.
It’s not a vision of the future from 2021 that Power Glove are interested in. Like the way Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day advanced a notion of the future that would have been posited in 1893, Power Glove are interested in what the future was supposed to look like from the present of the 1980s, and this is a crucial distinction, because of how reliant the music is on the synth, which was overtaking the guitar as the instrument of the decade.
Eddie Van Halen’s success as a guitarist had as much to do with his ability to make it sound like his instrument was being played by a computer than his natural talent and charisma. Or maybe the two things were so intertwined that it’s hopeless to try and separate them. There was absolutely an inhuman quality to his fretboard tapping. He was taking his instrument further than it had even taken before, and this is the intersectional quality of the 1980s, from the door that opened upward on the Delorean, to Van Halen’s brown sound, to some of the decade’s more bizarre architectural manifestations.
^ The Nelson Fine Arts Centre in Phoenix, Arizona, completed in 1990. But, as anyone alive in 1990 can tell you, the 1980s still existed in 1990. (Just like Bob Dylan’s insistence that the 1950s still existed well into the early 1960s.)
Just like chillwave got a boost from a different medium in television when Portlandia used “Feel It All Around” as their theme song, synthwave got a similar boost, if not as culturally widespread, when Power Glove’s track “Vengeance” was used in the horror anthology film The ABCs of Death and “Hunters” in the Canadian horror film Hobo With A Shotgun. As with Portlandia boosting Washed Out, I thought both films were decent ways to get Power Glove’s music to more people, but underwhelming as a whole. When more of Power Glove’s music was used in the Adam Wingard directed The Guest, a film featuring Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens and It Follows’ Maika Monroe, they were already the genre’s most popular group.
When I first started Googling Power Glove back in 2014, I thought it was funny that their website was powergloveaudio.com, as if their commitment to audio fidelity was such that they considered themselves more an audio/visual shop than an actual musical duo, but then I learned about the Nintendo Power Metal band Powerglove, who play metal versions of NES games, an M.O. that is pretty cheesy. Until and unless Powerglove covers Ironsword: Wizards and Warriors II, a video game perhaps more famous for its Fabio cover than its gameplay, I would prefer to hear Power Glove over Powerglove. (The preceding sentence has been nominated for Most Confusing Sentence 2021. I count on your support to win.)
But therein lies the crucial distinction. The metal Powerglove are a cover band. The Australian duo Power Glove write original music inspired by specific 1980s cultural artifacts. It’s a huge difference, a vast gulf in differing ambition. My favourite Power Glove release right now is a song called “Maximum Potential,” which was inspired sonically by the soundtrack to Dolph Lundgren’s 1987 workout video, titled Maximum Potential but not actually a cover of the music.
That’s not Lundgren in the above photo still, it’s weightlifting legend Tom Platz, a man who, when posing, tended to look less like a person than a wax figure.
The real Dolph Lundgren is pictured below. To learn more about his career as an “actor,” a job that, for him at least, consisted chiefly of monosyllabic mumbling in increasingly shitty movies (by the late 1990s he wasn’t even working in B movies anymore. They were Z movies), read this excellent article by Grantland. Fun fact: a pre-fame Quentin Tarantino worked as a production assistant on the Lundgren workout video.
Although “Maximum Potential” is one of their better efforts, adding, for the first time, a treble-heavy guitar into the mix, the song that first got me into Power Glove was “Nightforce.”
What is most impressive about “Nightforce” is its sheer number of hooks. There are about 15 different musical phrases that a less ambitious band would have simply used over the course of a whole album, whereas Power Glove puts all that effort into just one song. No wonder they aren’t prolific in the slightest.
Visually, you can clearly see John Connor’s father, Michael Biehn’s likeness, under all that military helmet gear. Terminator was a huge movie for me as a kid, stoking my fears of the coming computer takeover, and also showing me my first ever sex scene (the one in which John Connor is apparently ahem…“transferred” from his Dad’s balls to his Mom’s ovaries.)
The last ten seconds of “Nightforce” are clearly sampled from an actual 1980s videogame soundtrack, so if anyone reading this can figure out what game it is, please let me know in the comments. My curiosity is killing me.
The front cover of the 2019 documentary The Rise of the Synths is obviously aware of the Terminator aesthetic, taking their title from the third (and worst) instalment in the series, and showing an anonymous mountainous geographical region in the background, which again…comes back to desert iconography.
This documentary features a lengthy interview with Power Glove and other synthwave artists in which they describe their devotion to the 80s aesthetic, some gravitating to more lo-fi manifestations like VHS tapes with bad tracking issues and/or Max Headroom, and others, like Power Glove, tending toward slicker productions. There is even as interview with film director John Carpenter, but he admits to being cheerfully oblivious to the genre, even as many of its principal acts open for him on his tours and blow him away in terms of live performance. If you’ve seen any videos, you’ve seen that Carpenter just stands there and presses buttons. You can do that from home.
My biggest complaint with earlier Power Glove releases was that their commitment to the video game aesthetic was such that video game sound effects, like screaming and machine gun fire, often overpowered the music itself, and such sonic bric a brac discourages repeated listens.
This is at least true of earlier stuff like “Nightforce.” And “Vengeance” is a compelling enough piece of music without the silly sound effects, at least IMHO.
At the very least, the sound effects could have been used more sparingly. When you close your eyes and listen, it is remarkably easy to see some 1980s side-scrolling Streets of Rage-style fight game. An urban hellscape where your protagonist looks like Street Fighter’s Guile, all biceps and blonde hair.
Kinda Dolph Lundgren-esque, wouldn’t ya say?
Just as TV’s Portlandia lead to millions of listeners to seek Washed Out, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive did the exact same thing for synthwave. After an extremely tense ten minute opening car chase scene, shot mostly from inside the car with a single camera, the tension is finally released and the viewer is treated to helicopter shots of a beautiful futuristic nightscape, that gorgeous visual design and pretty in pink font and the artist Kavinsky and his syrupy and glacial “Nightcall.”
I mean…fuck…could those bpm be any fucking slower? Is Kavinsky on qualudes? Does he not just have an audio-visual obsession with a bygone 1980s era, but also a line on its most popular downer drug? Who knows. I just know that the visual and the audial compliment each other perfectly in synthwave, even better than in chillwave.
Unfortunately, Drive also brought to the forefront a more commercialized aspect of synthwave, the shitty song “A Real Hero” by College & Electric Youth. In the film, because Gosling’s character either can’t or won’t form full sentences, he is shown bonding with Carey Mulligan and child by driving them down the viaducts of the Los Angeles river in the car he keeps borrowing from Bryan Cranston.
Later on, he gets stabbed in the gut to assure the safety and happiness of Mulligan and her offspring and her just-out-of-jail hubby, and he drives off into the desert, presumably to die. I mean, there are no hospitals or emergency rooms where Gosling’s nameless Driver character is going. He drives into that same sunset Jimmy gazes at in The Wizard, to the pumping beats of “A Real Hero.”
So that’s the choice you gotta make with synthwave. It’s entirely up to you. Is it worth it to sometimes be subject to total cheeseball songs like this one…
or songs this one… (I actually can’t decide if I like this song or not)
or this one (I actually love this song…I don’t care if Sky looks 14 years old. It’s the song I love. My heart goes out to her because she too dated a heroin addict who couldn’t clean up for her, and so she left him, but not before he wrecked her reputation with a very public drug bust).
In The Wizard, little Jimmy wins a Nintendo tournament just rife with the kind of music synthwave blasts out every day. I mean…isn’t it a bad thing that I can’t tell if I like some of synthwaves most famous songs?
Whatever.
Just like in life, the bad stuff is worth it if it means we can get the good stuff.
Robert Downey Jr. once said, regarding his addiction:
“I’m a fifty-fifty guy. I’m willing to feel like shit half the time if it means I can feel good the other half.”
I’m not saying I agree, but I agree if I can transpose that philosophy toward synthwave. And synthwave’s batting average is much better than 0.500. I like 85% of what I hear.
So the bad songs are worth it, especially if it means we get to hear all the other beautiful wonderful musical explorations undertaken by a generation of kids who barely remember the 1980s because we were either one, two, three or four years old, but are following Thomas Pynchon’s dictum that we all “suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.”
Do you think it’s worth it? Before you answer, listen to that swooning sax from Luxury Elite’s “S.W.A.K.” from her masterpiece World Class.
"Imagine for a moment if you will, a parallel universe in which Tom Cruise’s 1988 hit Cocktail were actually a gritty noir, full of smoke-filled scenes of low-lit bars and brutalist executive suites. 'World Class' -- the new full-length from Luxury Elite -- is the essential soundtrack to such a film; a love letter to ‘80s America, smooth jazz, lounge music and skyscraper skylines by night. Vaporwave is often greeted with the same nose-up attitudes as chillwave and witch house before it, but with 'World Class,' Luxury Elite demonstrates that there’s more to the genre than just putting a few samples together. Opener "S.W.A.K." is a bold, funk-filled pop song; the hazy "Upscale" a shimmering slice of Balearic that’s as appropriate for late night, open-top drives as it is for sipping a cold one on a faraway beach.” - DIY Magazine
Again, I’m not sure how all this connects. I just know that it does. My great Lost America I can only find in certain songs, in certain strains of dark purple fentanyl, and in the ripped and torn pages of books remaindered and magazines forgotten in the attics of Iowa…
The midi tones of video games from my youth and the vast indifference of geological formations, formations that had their human manifestation in the cruel adults who came in and out my life and then “retreat[ed] back into their vast carelessness,” if I can quote The Great Gatsby, have formed a mental marriage in my mind and in the minds of countless synthwave artists from disparate places around the globe. You’ve got Marvel83’ in Prague. Luxury Elite from nowhere (she hasn’t said). Vektroid/Macintosh Plus from outer space. Sky Ferreira living her best bicoastal life, from L.A. to NYC whenever she fucking feels like it because she belongs to the diamond realm, the ones who can buy whole cars on credit cards.
As for me, I’ve been trying to get to California my whole fucking life. I keep getting stopped by navel-gazing, woe-is-me Highway Patrolmen. Or people going the wrong way. Ever see that documentary Dragonslayer (2011)? I wonder how the last five years have turned out for that loser.
Is it better to keep it all a fantasy than to finally get there and smell the exhaust and have the dream shatter? What keeps me from just going?
I’ll tell you. Nowadays I’m the one who put the handcuffs on myself. They call methadone “liquid handcuffs” don’tcha know. If I’m ever going to fulfill my lifelong dream of jumping a train across Canada (don’t smirk…I’ve hitchhiked this country, I can jump a train across it…if I can ever get off this fucking methadone shit), I’m gonna have to be strong, stronger than I have ever been up to this point.
William T. Vollmann. the writer whose sister drowned under his auspices, jumped and rode trains across America after recovering from a stroke, and then wrote about it in his excellent Riding Toward Everywhere (2008) which my mother got me for Xmas 2014.
I had no reason on Earth to go to Cheyenne, not until then, gazing down through the pine meadows into the blue and indigo mountains ahead, wild-hearted beauty that brought tears to my eyes, amazing me that this was all part of one country, which was my country; so that for a moment, in spite of the torturer President we had in those days, I gloried as I used to do in being American. - (p 74-75)
If Vollmann can do what he did after a stroke at age 49 or whatever it was, I’m pretty sure I can get off methadone (which takes a full month of crippling, bone-aching illness) and fentanyl (which is more intense but only takes 7-9 days of crippling, bone-aching illness). This is the year I do it. I’ve been reading the stories of a long-forgotten American hobo poet named Jim Tully. Listen to this:
The imaginative young vagabond quickly loses the social instincts that help to make life bearable for other men. Always he hears voices calling in the night from far-away places where blue waters lap strange shores.
That’s from a book called Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography (1924, p 167). I relate to Tully here. I hear voices in the night. Or rather, a single voice, a legion of beckoning songs that know my name. The voice of the night. Hell, it’s even the name of my favourite Dean Koontz novel.
As with writing, hitchhiking or traveling of this kind is a solo endeavour. Even if you’re with people, on a Greyhound, on a flatbed, you’re really all alone. And so I’ll have to take my last great trip all by my lonesome; with nobody else invited.
I hitchhiked Canada alone, I can train hop Canada alone (especially since I plan on crossing the U.S. border illegally and making my way down to Sante Fe, where the rails lead to all points west and my mythical California.)
Kerouac had a mythical West. Look how he turned out! So why can’t I have one? LAWL.
Exercise helps a lot when you’re getting over P.A.W.S. and dopesickness. At least now I know what kinda music I’m gonna be listening to as I pump iron.
That’s another thing I like about synthwave, btw. The gender division isn’t anywhere near as disproportionate as in indie rock or metal. Many of my favourite synthwave artists are women. Luxury Elite. Keep Shelly In Athens.
Vektroid, who made Vaporwave’s flagship album, Floral Shoppe, is a woman.
Gunship is led by a woman. Check out their badass cover of “Eleanor Rigby.” The song is nearly unrecognizable.
Reminds me of XXYYXX’s “Letter 23.”
Q: Where you goin, son?
A: California.
Q: …
A: And all places in between.
I’ll see the deserts of Arizona. Keep an eye out for my upcoming collection of noetry and noems titled Arizona Highways, yes a title culled from the monthly magazine that has more beautiful photos in ten years than a century of National Geographic and Scientific American, but only if you like asphalt strips running to the horizon and red rocks in the dying sun and endless dunes of sand and tropical grass bending in the breeze, simultaneously servile and waving free.
Oh, I’ll get to California.
If it’s the last fucking thing I ever do.
And I’ll have a buncha hot jams on my cracked phone to help get me there. Synthwave.
Up next, review-wise: Vaporwave. To prepare yourself, check out its most famous album, the abovementioned Vektroid (who on this record uses the name Macintosh Plus) Floral Shoppe.
Warning: It might get weird.