by Will
I’m thinking about what my favorite new releases are since I’ve been in college. I thought I’d write down some of my thought process while thinking about this and talk about some of these albums. As is so often my first step in assigning superlatives to albums I ventured to my last.fm. This gives me a good idea of what my most played albums have been and makes sure I won’t leave any obvious one’s out. I was going to make this all one article but this got pretty long, so I’ll leave it at just discussing one album. Future posts will talk about Tierra Whack, IDK, Hippo Campus, Playboi Carti and others.
Hi This Is Flume
oooooh hot mama. Flume has had as much an impact on the type of music I listen to as anyone else has. Junior year of high school my at the time girlfriend asked me to accompany her to a Flume concert with her at Red Rocks. I’d never been to a concert before and the prospect of going to the top of a very steep rocky slop to see an artist who’s music i found unfamiliar, loud and frankly frightening was not something I was interested in. I politely declined.
I look back on one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made.
The chance to see experience flume’s gut wrenching spine tingling finger licking frog catching music atop a mountain glowing in a warm sunset… COME ON what was I thinking.
A pivotal moment freshman year was Jamie introduced me to Sleepless from Flume’s debut album. This song quickly became one of my anthems for the year. A highlight of freshman year is laying in a tent with Jamie, both of us half conscious, loosing our minds while listening to this song on repeat.
Its absolutely hypnotic. The pulsating high pitched voice drives the song like a heart beat between these frantic sections where the voice gets really chipmunky and intense to parts where its really slow and low. It all build up to one of my all-time favorite drops near the end (2:24). It’s not a hard drop, more like all of the percussion and synths coming in at once while the voice just goes nuts. It draws you in and makes your blood boil. One of the all time best late night driving songs. So this was my introduction to flume. Trippy rhymtic vocals over strong drums and synths with what I would call “soft drops”. This brought me into the world of Odesza, Mura Masa and Louis the Child. By sophomore year this soft EDM has chiseled itself a sizable hole in my daily listening.
I mention all of this because I think this development is what paved the way for Flume’s 2019 mixtape to blow me away in the way that it did.
Hi This Is Flume: a bold introduction showcasing his new sound to the world. Flashback to March last year and me seeing on reddit that Flume is going to premier his latest work in several hours. I posted up at my desk with my headphones to watch the trippy desert, slime and automobile themed mixtape visualization that played alongside the albums premier. This was truly unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It’s glitchy, sticky and sharp the whole way through. I don’t normally enjoy glitchy music but Flume’s able to combine these random sharp noises into beautiful melodies.
Jewel begins with a sequence of beeps with disappointed clapping that escalations into cascading synths that sound half human. The meandering beeps take you from one synth break to the next while statically drums stab at your brain. Voices features SOPHIE’s high pitched distorted vocals over these nosies that I just cannot begin to describe. A wanna shoutout Upgrade too, its some dude yelling “YEAH” over and over while a computer has a mental breakdown in the background; but slowly the sun rises on the second half of the song as it melts into 71m3. Now, 71m3 is my favorite song on the album, perhaps my favorite song of the past 2 years. It has all of the same hypnotic and melodic commonest that I loved from sleepless but its so much sharper. There is so much emotion in the rising and falling voices that it’s sometimes too much to handle. The little rise and fall at :50 and buildup to the mini drop at :58 is one of my favorite musical moments ever. This song sound like Sun Models grew up. Then look at Spring, one of the last tracks. This is a song that I jam out to in my car, laughing while imagining what my parents would say if they could hear what I was listening to. This song is just absurd, its based around this noise that sounds like one of those spin-to-win games at a carnival.
Over a year later and this album continues to surprise me. I hear new things every-time I listen. Flume finds a way to be beautifully melodic and glitchy/jumpy at the same time. Hi This Is Flume currently has the honor of being my 5th most played album of all-time and #1 out of albums released during college. The songs flow together in a beautiful way. It makes me thing of a boat on a dark cold river river with icy trees and desert skies. I recommend everyone hop aboard and floats downstream.
A kid I did birthright with had a jacket that reminded me a lot of the album cover
This Vibe Has Flown 