$6 //
Edition of 50 //
https://suite309.bandcamp.com/album/all-night //
On "All Night", CDX has four tracks that are all xx:xx, which means they are all over ten minutes long and thus I feel like you could listen to this all night long. Ok, so, I like to connect my reviews to sort of feel like I'm telling a story (if I can) and that would be my story here. I recently reviewed a digital EP by an artist called Fairuza Balk (who I'm pretty sure is not the actress) and that made me watch "The Waterboy" for the hundredth time and Rob Schneider says at the end "You can do it... all night long!" So we shall assume that is where this title came from.
Right from the start CDX brings the steady beats. With the electronic beeps this is moderately paced and makes me think of the movie "Go". Laser synths come through as a symphony and it is worth noting that during the course of the song "Guitar Solo" I do not recognize any actual guitars. That Mario collecting coins sound comes in and then there are also drum machine guns. Higher pitched tones bring out laser shots which sound like a phone ringing. It maintains its video game feel while steady drop tone phones are apparent as well. As we near the end of the first song it sounds as if it is saying "I remember" but clearly the music has just driven me to further madness.
Pong style video game beeps open up the next track, which leads to an eventual all out war in video game based lasers. The pace begins to pick up for this song and there is a tribal banging as well, in a percussion sense. The biggest thing you should think about when listening to the second song is the contrast between this feeling like a video game (technologically advanced) and some sort of percussion from the deep jungles (not as advanced). Then you need to ask yourself: are these two opposite sides of the coin working together somehow-- is the video game generated sound mimicking the authentic percussion or are they at war with each other?
Big jazz bass feels kick things off on the flip side. It has a more serious sense to it now. Tones come through which kind of sound like car alarms. Whooshes bring us into a little bit of funk. Throughout this all it has maintained that sense of video game feel but this time around it could be closer to pinball. The fourth track starts with big beats like the ones which opened this cassette in the first place. Unce unce. Crazy lasers now. There is this bit of weird water and then it turns from structured loops into something more chaotic. Lost tones signal as if they are trying to find help and at the end we just sort of drift off into virtual space.
What "All Night" does that not a lot of albums can do is it tells a story but it also manages to have this pacing to the story that makes sense. It's not ever too slow but it's also not too much all at once either. On rock albums, I feel a lot of bands have lost focus when it comes to this as if you have a ballad you want to put it at number 8 out of 12 tracks not at number 2 or 3, but bands do it because they don't care. So to really break this down into smaller songs, it would have the similarities of a rock album which was aware of and knew how to properly arrange their songs 1 through 12, which is something we still don't see a lot of these days.
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