Review by: Aimee
After producing nearly a decade’s worth of chart-topping club tracks as Dream Traveler, Joey Fehrenbach surprises us with a full-length debut album of calmer, more emotional music of which there are no club tracks to be found.
Mellowdrama is an incredibly ambitious effort fusing Ambient and Downtempo tracks. Registering at nearly 50-minutes, the album contains a mixture of dark and moody songs, which often straddle the line between melancholy, uplifting, emotional, thought provoking, and inspirational.
Mellowdrama is an enlivening mix of longing, loneliness, and minimalism. One listen, and you may be reminded of Ulrich Schnauss’ A Strangely Isolated Place or Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase, but Mellowdrama is much more than that.
Mellowdrama’s opening track, Being Around You, starts with a minimalist groove that slowly builds without ever meandering aimlessly. The minimal beat is eventually taken over by a catchy synth melody reminiscent of The Cure, which finally gives way to vocoded vocals.
Introducing more atmospheric and organic sounds, a high point of Mellowdrama is the album’s second track, Runaway Child. With its radio friendly beats, male vox, and a haunting, infectious melodic synth hook, the song boasts a reverb so cavernous, it could have been recorded from the farthest corner of the universe.
The atmospheric and organic sounds introduced in Runaway Child are further explored in track three, Behold, via expressive Moog synths and Theramin sounds, which are successfully used to capture emotion. Its melody is as thoughtful, as it is expressive, haunting and romantic.
Track four, Particles, is a more chill, jazzy, and loungy track than can be found elsewhere on the album. As the track builds, it crosses over into more familiar drum and bass territory. The amalgamation of these sounds work together to create one of the album’s stand out tracks.
Rain, is the only full vocal track on the album, which tells the story of a messy breakup via jaded, haunting vocals wrapped in a dark orchestra of sound.
Conversely, track seven, I Remember, is more optimistic and hopeful. It starts out minimally with synced water drips and a groovy beat, but builds into a bigger sum of its parts, culminating with a detuned synth lead, and bold acoustic guitar hook taking over the mix.
Mellowdrama closes with Fehrenbach’s massive orchestral song The Beginning, which is written in "movements.” Beginning with a sublime beat and getting darker and moodier in the middle, the final movement returns once again to the sublime, completed with blissful, radiant beats.
Mellowdrama is a solid debut and takes the listener on an auditory journey through the haunting, dark, lonely, and twisted without dwelling in too far in the melancholy. The underlying euphoric and inspiring beats throughout ensure that Mellowdrama is aural pleasure from beginning to end, while being affable and unexpected at the same time. -Dea Lazaro (1212 Media)
|
