The vocal sample of Lipa singing “ see me” feels searching for connection, more comparable to something from The Who’s Tommy above Lipa’s own tune, all without coming across like it is undermining or otherwise subverting Lipa as an artist.
“See Me” is built around a vocal sample taken from “Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa, a triumphant and defiant breakup tune, repurposed here as a different sort of celebratory. Well, we’ve had ourselves a world-changing catastrophe, and I think we’re mostly out of patience for post-ironic sentiments…and, crucially, so are death’s dynamic shroud.wmv (one of them, anyway). When I talked about Floral Shoppe, I used it to describe vaporwave as a whole as “ a clownhouse mirror held up towards 80s pop” that could be argued as being “ post-ironic pisstaking that will be forgotten when the next world-changing catastrophe comes”. So, then, why talk about it? What makes this vaporwave album stand out and make me want to check out more from this genre? Well, I could go into some version of “because it’s good and energetic and engaging” (and it is), but there’s something transformative here that I feel deserves to be celebrated. Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: death's dynamic shroud – Faith in Persona (Official Audio) () If my count is correct, Faith in Persona is their nineteenth album, and for as many names work behind the scenes, this album is credited exclusively to Keith Rankin, who has made a name for himself under the pseudonym Giant Claw, which begs the question of, outside of considerations involving clearing samples, why not release this as a solo record? There’s a lot of odd elements involved in just encountering this album, including that there’s a good chance this won’t be on your streaming service at the time you read this, and it stands to reason this would be enough to turn someone off from it without giving the music a chance.
death’s dynamic shroud.wmv (they insist on the lack of capitalization) are a collective of artists who have been doing this for a while, with their work dating back to at least 2014 and having released enough albums over unconventional channels that one needs to look up wikis to keep track of their work. The last thing I expected, in other words, was for an act whose name sounded like an ARG component of a creepypasta to put out something that opened my eyes to the greater possibilities of the genre, but that seems to be where I’m at. Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: death's dynamic shroud – See Me (Official Audio) () This is not to suggest the genre is worthless by any means, but it felt like there wasn’t much progress being made, giving the impression the scene was going to die out any day.
I’d occasionally come across a song or mix that sounded fine, but everything I’ve encountered in the past ten years that could be described as vaporwave (or vaporwave-adjacent) sounded like it could have been made in the month after Floral Shoppe was released. That was in February of 2019, aka several lifetimes ago, and I was discussing an album that was old news at the time (it recently celebrated ten years since its release), so it stands to reason that a great many advances have been made in the genre in the interim, and I paid basically no notice to any of them. The last time I talked about a vaporwave album was a retrospective piece on Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe, a record even the most oppositional to the genre will at least grant to be described as “seminal”. This week, we cover one of the most celebrated vaporwave albums of the year.