Born Gold

Every so often you hear something that kind of ruins everything else in your life. One minute you're a full fledged contributing member of society, the next minute you're a fucking zombie who can do nothing but think about what you heard and plan your new life around finding time to listen to it. Trying to fight the urge to listen to it will only piss you off, because no matter what's in front of you, you'd wager throwing everything else into the air while throwing this specific sound into your ears would be the most enjoyable.

This happens more often than I'd like to admit, but as a music nerd, it's a welcome plight. Normally I'll go weeks without physically fiending for music from anyone. Usually it's the same process: try out some new shit for a while, but then settle on an old standby. That long stretch of road between home and work where I do my best listening doesn't deserve to have a few dozen thirty second snippets of music I'll just delete when I get the opportunity, it deserves a hands off musical coma goddamnit.

I'm partial to cramming as much music into my commute as possible every day, both ways, and I actually look forward to traffic out here on the country roads I travel daily. If I'm merely sifting through music I've never heard, and have had no luck in finding something to stick with, it seems to frustrate me in other areas of my life. The disinterest spreads to what I want for dinner, what's on tap for the weekend, how i respond to my wife asking "how was your day?", basically my attitude in general.

Music isn't just something I enjoy, it's something I fucking need.

These past few days I've been obsessing over one album from one artist and it may be the one album I needed more than I care to admit. It's taken a dull and sullen autumn and actually made the change of seasons more vivid, more notable, more memorable. This album doesn't just sound amazing to my snob-ears, it has completely reinvigorated my approach to other new music.

I'm appreciating what I wouldn't have appreciated just a few days ago because I'm fucking happy again.

This album is from an artist who is already one of my favorites, and their previous works have been some of my favorite music created in the past five years, but this time it's extremely different. There is no precedence for this artist to make this type of music. A good friend of mine who sent me the album was leary of the change, and hell, so the fuck was I. Considering we both share a hardon for the artist, we normally mirror each other's opinions and intensity when discussing it.

I didn't allow my friend's opinion to influence my own, mainly because I'm an asshole, but also because I tend to place trust in an artist who has awarded me with any sort of pleasure in the past. Where on one hand I enjoy knowing what I'm walking into when hearing a new album from a trusted source, I have never in my life taken offense to a different genre direction, an attempt at a new sound, or a musician taking a risk. If we always expect the same shit from the artists we support, we're bound to be disappointed once they run out of different takes on the same shit.

This time around I've found so much pleasure in this completely different sound I've listened to little else, and I'm hoping you'll read all the way to the end to find out just who and what the fuck I'm talking about.

Now that you know I won't spill the who or what, allow me to tell you a bit about the how it feels.

It's sullen but intense in a way that reminds me of how, the day after, I picture a night out where everything was just fucking magic. You think back to just a few hours prior, maybe even flipping through pictures of the events you just lived through, and everything takes on a sheen of cinematic proportions. This music lends itself to how NFL Films makes amazing plays that happened only a few minutes ago seem like plays straight out of the fourth quarter of a classic Super Bowl you watched when you were 10 years old. This music makes your memories magic, almost like throwing an Instagram filter on your short term along with a thousand or so up-votes on your karma.

When describing the album back to my friend who delivered it to me, I told him it felt like I was watching something amazingly normal happen in slow motion, and noticing only how beautiful seemingly dumb shit can seem in slow motion. Like, your son beating a level on Angry Birds and throwing his fists in the air, or a coworker throwing their pen down on a desk in frustration, or a driver of an unknown vehicle waiting and letting cars turn in front of them on a busy two lane highway.

While it might not be pyrotechnics and strippers with bacon wrapped titties, or even anything particularly interesting, the music I've been stuck on these past few days is slowing me down. I can almost feel the 2012-media-overload turning off because of it.

I'm not veering onto the shoulder of the road to pass that asshole in the Pontiac Aztec, even though I question anyone who buys one of those shits. I'm not squeezing that asshole who popped out of my lane ten cars behind me only to try and merge in front of me, even though I'd normally tell him to eat shit. I'm not in any particular hurry.

This album sounds like a hybrid of what those who don't listen to dubstep (raises hand) consider occasionally dubsteppy and what 'a tripped out Kanye West (the producer) meets Justin Timberlake while coming off of mushrooms' might create under a self made fort in the living room of a complete stranger.

It's odd. It's comfortably strange. Electronic and distant, spacey and introspective, it's something I would imagine coming out of every dorm room I've ever clam baked under a black light.

There are tracks that take house music and completely air fuck it, and there are tracks that take effected vocals and send them through the seven layers of hell, and then there a few tracks where you're waking on water while holding a half full bottle of water in one hand while a friend is blowing your eyes wide open with a Vicks inhaler.

If an album can completely take over my life in such a way, I don't see why it can't do the same to yours if you let it.

Born Gold is the artist. Little Sleepwalker the album. I don't want to listen to anything else for a while. And that's fucking huge.

Follow his tumblr and then shower him in dolla dolla bills ya'll.