Bam's Music Reviews: Hawaii: Part II (ミラクルミュージカル, 2012)
I'm Bam. I like possums, I like music! Let's get into it~
Hawaii: Part II is... odd. While I enjoyed the album for its sound being nothing like I had been familiar with, I've since listened to and experienced stuff that's way, way further out there than the album ever achieves, and giving the album another shot after so long has made the thing feel like it really doesn't know what it wants to be. The sound of the album is all over the place and hops from genre to genre, but unlike the last album that I reviewed, 1000 Gecs, the genre-shifting on this album doesn't work at all. On one hand, it really wants to sound quirky in a nerdy way, much like something like Lemon Demon or, funnily enough, Tally Hall, by utilizing French and Japanese on tracks like "宇宙ステーションのレベル7 (Space Station Level 7)" and blocky synths on tracks like "Time Machine", while also going completely off the rails to try something radical and unexpected, like "Mind Electric" being one song played twice with the first play being in reverse, or "Labyrinth" being a VERY out-of-place rap song. It does all of these things to try and seem unique... and yet the project kind of ends up just feeling flat and uninspired in a pretty rough way.
Another thing that irks me about the album is that it feels quite pompous, something an album that also feels uninspired shouldn't be feeling like. This is most evident in many of the lyrics to the album, such as "Gone, but not forgotten; Long, but long-forgotten old lore" on the track "Isle Unto Itself" being an overly artsy way of essentially saying "We die and feel sad about that, but we'll forget it eventually!", or the lyrical drivel that is "Labyrinth" simultaneously trying to convey the feelings of being stuck after a break-up and trying to escape a metaphorical (or maybe even a literal) labyrinth while also trying to imply the thing takes place in a video game? If you haven't noticed yet, I'm not a huge fan of "Labyrinth"...
I feel like no song on the album could further exemplify the issues I have with the album than the one big track off the album, "Dream Sweet in Sea Major". Compared to the rest of the album's quick pace (aside from "The Mind Electric" but that's the same song played twice so I don't really count it), "Dream Sweet" is a 7-minute behemoth, both incorporating the opening track "Introduction to the Snow" and jumping from 50s-inspired pizzicato melodies to slow choir sections, culminating in a bassy pop outro incorporating sounds from the whole song. On paper, this should sound great! Unfortunately, the core issues of the entire album are present at once here: The song feels like it has no real identity, as seen by it essentially grabbing the opening track in its entirety and slapping it onto the thing while changing one or two lines. The song feels rather dull, not really doing much to deviate or experiment with the elements it's utilizing. And finally, the song feels pompous and smug, both through its considerably longer length compared to the rest of the album, but by also having arguably the most hilariously pretentious lyric on the entire album, "It feels like flying, but maybe we're dying", which sounds like something I would hear on r/im14andthisisdeep. It really feels like Hawley saw some of the demos he had lying around and thought to himself: "Man! I'm gonna slap like four demos together and turn it into one big song at the end! All the cool kids make their final tracks long with their albums!"
All of this being said, the album does have some good aspects to it. While the lyrics on "Labyrinth" are... well... "Labyrinth", Shane Maux's flow and rapping itself is quite tight, and the track "Murders" is a rather fun and fast-paced dark cabaret track with dark and intense piano playing that makes me feel sad that the pianist of Tally Hall, Andrew Horowitz, didn't contribute to the album. The instrumentation in general is quite solid, and in general, I had a better time with the instrumental version of the album, Hawaii: Part II: Part ii (which is a very dumb name), although I did not listen to the demos on that version.
Hawaii: Part II is... definitely an album. Is it a good album? No, not really. But I've certainly heard worse as well, even if I did really go to town on this project. I think the reason why I feel this way is that there's a lot of stuff out there that does what this album tries to do, but better. If Hawaii is your introduction to the deep wide world of indie music, I really hope you won't stop here, as it would be like wanting to learn how to swim at a kiddie pool, and then sticking in said kiddie pool after learning when much more comfortable and larger pools are right within seeing distance.
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