Temporary Hero has got it all going on here: early 90s house piano, upsurging drum fills popularised in late 90s chart dance, smooth funk basslines, nagging clean guitar lines that go nowhere, slick but ultimately weak and bland vocals. Those would be the vocals of his revolving door of guest singers, then, presumably selected for their anonymous soul.
Some deeper grooves grind and gurn alongside a slew of lightweight dance-pop. When I say it’s club-friendly, I’m talking about crappy townie clubs – meat-markets - where bozos in shiny shoes and Top Man shirts try to cop off scantily-clad desperados and the nights invariably end with scraps and vomit. They’re not there for the music and are content to bump and grind to flaccid manufactured pop, anything with a beat.
It aims for euphoric but the endless permutations of tales of heartbreak and breakups and soul-shredding anguish compound on one another with depressing effect, the sub/dom lyrical leanings of some tracks just sound lame and the undulating synth grooves that underpin dark chillwave vibes are almost as much of a downer as the conveyor belt of clichés, and no number of whoops can counteract the relentless grimness.
|
‘Life sucks and then you die / it doesn’t have to be that way’ whoever it is sings on ‘As it Is’. Pardon my nihilism, but I believe it pretty much does. Life sucks even more when you have to listen to pap like this. Still, it probably sucks even more if this kind of anodyne cack is the soundtrack to your life.
Temporary Hero Online
|
