The Daily Spin, February 16
acloudyskye | A Place Where Mountains Hide
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: A Place Where Mountains Hide (2019)
Artist: acloudyskye
Link:
A Place Where Mountains Hide is a very Lorn-like album of wonky songs, heavy on bass and percussive elements to the point that it sounds near-catastrophic, turning hip-hop beats into horror-like video game tunes.
As each song builds, there are intriguing elements there, synths used front and back to expand and contract the song at will, while the band takes a cue from ODESZA or any number of stadium electronica groups to add a brass element, but at the end of the day, so much of this feels a little shortsighted - every track on the album has a similar enough drop that it sort of feels inescapable.
All roads lead to Rome - or in this, a pretty standard drop, formulaic in enough aspects to outweigh the unique instrumentation used to craft the album. Enough of that instrumentation shines through in each track for them to not feel wasted, but a lot of the post-drop elements to the album feel like wasted time.
Rating: 7.3/10
Best Tracks: Skull Eater; Falloff
Worst Tracks: Enveloping