The Daily Spin, May 7
Big Wild | Superdream
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: Superdream (2019)
Artist: Big Wild
Link:
Big Wild have carved out a comfortable seat in the world of poptimism, a sort of happy-go-lucky electronic variant on modern pop and today’s electronica. With effects pulled from tropical house and jazzier influences - think Griz meets Kygo with a little Jon Bellion and ODESZA sprinkled in - it’s a wonderfully unique combination, if one that doesn’t necessarily sort itself very generously to the album experience.
Those big room influences are strong on Superdream, most evidently in my personal favorite tracks, like ‘Pale Blue Dot’, where the brass and drums trade punches in a very DROELOE-type manner, a high vocal sample running wild overtop, building to the moment it all falls away, deconstructing the drop to ride out the wave.
Big Wild have a very Californian air about them, in my mind, possibly because I’ve done the vast majority of my listening to them while a student in California, but regardless - it’s surf music, the sort you’ll faintly hear on the PCH from a beat-up VW Bus with a long-haired twenty-something hanging out the side throwing up the shaka. This is maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing, probably both. All this to say, there’s a very specific headspace that a lot of this music puts me in, and it is both violently nostalgic and also completely insufferable - the type of mental state that I can only really tolerate in small doses these days, even if I also find myself yearning for it more and more as time passes.
When they deviate from the big room, they lose the quality that makes them so inherently fun, trying to add depth where levity should sit instead. Like the ocean their name embodies, it’s at its best when it’s clear, calm, and full of joy.
Rating: 8.1/10
Best Tracks: Pale Blue Dot, She Makes Magic, 6’s to 9’s
Worst Tracks: Mopsy’s Interlude, Joypunks