Music Review

Today’s prompt: “Write a music review for the sounds of your life – your personal, everyday soundtrack.”

Your album, “Day in the Life,” has a few standout tracks, but on the whole is fairly humdrum. Take the second song on the album, “Texting with Friends.” The whole thing is just “pak pak pak pak zhwoop, pak pak pak pak pak pok pak pak pok pak pak pak pak pok zhwoop.” The instrumentation could be called unique for a musical release, although it’s certainly familiar to anyone with an iPhone. I suppose there are some out there who would call it a searing indictment of the way we’ve allowed our human interactions to be subsumed by technology, and I might have been willing to give it that credit if the song ever actually went anywhere. The conceit starts out interesting, but the arrangement is fairly banal. It’s good white noise if you find yourself having trouble getting to sleep.

I honestly think I would have liked “Texting with Friends” were it not immediately followed by the nearly identical “Typing at Work,” with its series of “tak tak taks.” You probably should have spaced those out a bit.

“Mowing the Lawn” shakes things up a bit. It’s got a great opening hook with the “Vvvv. Vvvv. Vvvv. Vvvv.” of the lawnmower cord being pulled and failing to catch. But after that, it gets a bit monotonous, with the only change in the “vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv” tone coming when you hit a particularly weedy patch.

But there are, as I said, standout tracks, ones I will recommend to all my friends. “Being Chased by Knife-Wielding Killers Through a Parking Lot?” Sheer genius. Every footstep, every huffed breath utterly dynamic, and your screams at the end gave me chills. It’ll make my Top 20 list for the year for sure.