Miracle Swill has the name of a product you would discover on an infomercial at 2 in the morning. "Miracle Swill- It will cure all of your household needs!" But how many times have you felt like that with music? I feel like I constantly hear people say variations of "This is going to be bigger than The Beatles!" and then I listen to it only to find out it in fact just sounds like a poor rip off of The Beatles. But music is a sell in that way, and I find it weird. On one hand, you want people to listen to your music so you should believe in it and think it's the greatest. At the same time, people who are overly obnoxious about it seem to have less great sounds. (There is a balance which few find in self-promotion)
If there was a solid way to describe Miracle Swill, a straight and to the point genre to put them in or artist to compare them with then I don't think this cassette would be on Crass Lips. Miracle Swill does not just defy genres, this music manages to create them. It is creating so many new genres along the way I'm just trying to keep up. So what does this sound like? Well, I can give you a brief idea about it, but please note this is obviously another one of those situations (As all should be) that you simply need to hear it to fully grasp it.
These songs all tend to have beats behind them. There is singing. It's kind of got elements of pop to it, but there is also rock, hip hop and electronic. If something hip hop based combined to form a song with Queen (Which, if Queen was around now I think they'd totally do a crossover with Tyler, The Creator) and then somehow these electronic bits got put in as well, you might have an idea of what this would sound like. It's trip-hop, electro-pop, chillwave, vaporwave and at times even 8bit. Drum machines and singing remind me of the band Beans (who I googled and ended up down a rabbithole about because there are *a lot* of bands named Beans, but the one I'm thinking of had an album on Skunk Ape Records called "Young Love Gone Terribly Wrong")
Through synth based pop loops, I hear these back and forth beats on "Engine Oil" which makes me think of that one popular hip hop song which I want to say was "black and gold", but for some reason I also hear "red and yellow" because of Hulkamania. The song "Animal" has this fun. vibe to it and could be taken from any sort of musical or broadway type of show I have yet to discover. "Dog Barking" delivers with fast, distorted beats ala the "Run Lola, Run" soundtrack while a dog barks.
There is this certain level of pop in these songs. It's something like Owl City or Cute Is What We Aim For (Who I only really know for two songs, to be fair) but not the same since it has this appeal to it where I don't get sick of it after a few songs. It has a more grounded approach to that particular style, as if you might not even hear it on the radio because it's not overly bubblegum. And yet by the last song, we hear an acoustic number belted out in folk punk fashion.
What I find impressive about Miracle Swill is that their sound might not seem on the surface like it fits together but they make it work. And if you really think about it, there isn't that far of a stretch between drum machine beats into hip hop, synth keys into guitars, and then you take those into electronics, into video games, etc. It's all so closely related but rarely ends up heard together. If someone tried to put it together in the same song it might sound like two different songs and I've heard artists before try and combine styles in that manner and it just feels out of place but Miracle Swill (which is why you're watching this infomercial) just has that flow.
$5 //
https://miracleswill.bandcamp.com/album/capitalism-is-dope //
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