Jake Schrock's "Tropical Depression"

Okay, time for my first album review, and I don't mean first of this Gemlog project, but first ever because I've never done anything like this before. The first cab off the rank is:

Jake Schrock's "Tropical Depression".

This album isn't about being sad at a beachside resort, but rather has a vague theme of meteorology, oceanography, atmospheric science and the like, which comes through in the album art and also in track titles like "Surface Data" and "Pressure Change". Given the primarily musical ambitions of this whole project I feel a little silly admitting this so early on, but little things like this *do* colour my perception of an album and may give me a slight nudge toward deciding to buy something. I didn't just enjoy this slight Earth sciencey theme (a frefreshing change from the generic space theming you find on a lot of synth music, although "Cosmic Ocean" is skirting that line!), I also liked the authentically vintage looking font choice and graphical design of the album art. Vintage is, obviously, back in a big way, but often it manifests itself as a kind of re-imagined, exaggerated distillation of a few tired cliches which gives the whole thing a synthetic, "pandering squarely to a target audience" feel that I have a weird, Cayce Pollard-style reaction too. Anyway, Tropical Depression *doesn't* have that. If you bumped down the resolution of the photo of the cresting wave a bit, then if I found a sun-faded version of this cover on a long-forgotten casette tape somewhere, it wouldn't feel in the least bit out of place.

Right, good, what does it actually *sound* like?

This is the only album out of my first three which is purely electronic. It has a very "classic" synthy sound, with lots of monophonic, presumably analogue, synthesisers being sequenced and layered, but there are plenty of old drum machines in there too. In some ways the closest thing I have in my existing body of musical knowledge to connect this to are classic electronic artists like Jean Michel Jarre or Tangerine Dream, because the whole sequenced-monophonic-analogue thing gives them a similar "sonic palette" (busting out that phrase in my first review?! Okay, sure, why not), but there are real differences between the two. Tropical Depression is far less prone overall to long, wandering pads and ethereal swirliness than a lot of the early electronic music it sounds superficially similar to. It's not *absent* entirely, but on the whole there's more emphasis on melody and rhythm (the drum machines help a lot here, perhaps they are the main point of differentiation, actually), and the tracks tend to have clearly defined beginnings and ends, rather than all flowing together into one long session. It feels like things get to the point much more quickly. It's still a looong way from pop music, but it does feel noticeably more structured than some traditional music of this type and I think that's a good thing. I actually find music from this album popping into my head randomly throughout the day.

Certainly there are times when the "tropical storm" vibe comes through clearly in the music, but this doesn't feel clumsily done. I don't think that if you got a bunch of people to listen to this without knowing the track titles or having seen the album art, a majority of them would confidently tell you that the album "told the story" of a big storm or anything like that.

On the whole, I enjoy this album and I don't regret the purchase at all. But I wouldn't say I really love it and am excited to rush out and buy the rest of Schrock's catalogue or similar music. But I might casually explore stuff like this in future. I think the biggest revelation for me was hearing classic analogue drum machines used in a context I've never heard them before (almost certainly because I'm not well-listened, not because this is actually novel). I associate their sound most strongly with hip-hop, which I'm really not into. I think they do a lot better alongside a melodic synth component than by themselves or as background to vocals.

I don't think I'm going to bother assigning numeric ratings in these reivews, so I guess this is it!

I was very pleased to check Spacewalk this morning and find that Sloum is now also putting album reviews into Gemspace! Check out his:

"Music Machine" gemlog.