Giraffage - Too Real

Giraffage
Too Real
2017
Spotify

Vaporwave is a really delicate style of music. It can so easily fall into meme level parody, or at it's best encompass a sound and vibe that is totally unique. On this new album Giraffage tries to blend the sound of vaporwave, future funk and future R&B in this sort of mishmash of sounds and styles. When it works like on "Slowly" which is big trippy and pretty interesting you can see this genre and style has legs, but when it doesn't work man does it fall flat. The cover art will give you the sort of sense that Giraffage is trying to create, clearly 80s and 90s synth inspired, but on Too Real He is really trying to push things through a pop filter. The glitchiness of some of the tracks is so gentle and feels so tailormade for wide appeal none of them really hit. Sometimes Giraffage hits on something interesting like a really great "whommp" on "Edge" but He doesn't dive in to the interesting things and instead hovers around in a place where you can tell He wants more pop appeal but is feels like He can find that with this sound. It just doesn't seem all that likely, the kitsch level is just too high on a lot of this stuff. The 90s R&B vibes are in full effect on "Green Tea" so much so that you can almost feel the dance moves that would be spawned out of this song. However when a song feels this derivative it looses the thing that made it special in the first place. We could just go back and listen to some 90s R&B and experience the same thing.

You keep searching for some kind of edge to his music, something to allow it to be somewhat cutting, but it never arrives. The iPhone buzz at the beginning of  "Falling Softly" is so unnecessary and adds this odd fucking sense. It is almost like He is striving so hard for this Japanese influenced delicate sound, like on "Earth", but He only wants to take a cursory and view and move on. You see artists like POrter Robinson often incorporating Japanese anime elements into their music, but they let it flavor what they are doing rather than trying to get it to fully take over. I mean to be real honest He is jocking Porter Robinson real hard on this record especially in the later half. Too Real just ends up being a little too boring in the end. Unfortunately just another electronic album that will disappear into the ether.

4.0 out of 10