The support means the world to me, and thanks to your kind contributions I was able to go and visit my boy in Britain. I'll try and mock up a proper recap blog—though I am notoriously terrible at doing those, I don't think I've ever managed a proper recap blog for any of the various conventions I've gone to over the years. I guess there waslmao this rules · 3:28am Aug 5th, 2021
For those of you who don't know, I am what some may charitably call "a fan of music" and what others may more accurately refer to as "an insufferable hipster douchebag". And let me tell all you fine folks, there have been some musical shenanigans as of late starring one of the fandom's best and brightest musicians, Vylet Pony.
Vylet is a very talented musician with a very on-point meme game—check out her youtube channel, it's amazing even if you never listen to one of her (also incredible) songs. She's made some waves recently with her latest album: Cutiemarks (And The Things That Bind Us). Aside from being an exceptional hyperpop/electropop record, this album is easily Vylet's most adept. I got into her a couple months ago thanks to one of my good friends and I've been waiting for her to drop something like this given my love for several other artists in the hyperpop-bubblegum bass genre. Vylet used to be more on the brostep side of the fandom—a genre in the pony music sphere that certainly isn't lacking in contributors. Recently, she's been branching out from that more wubbily and dubbily side of sounds to dabble in jazzier and smoother electropop and indie pop and lounge—think Stereolab's Dots and Loops meets Flying Lotus's Cosmogramma. Love Letters (Colourless) was an awesome album-come-fanfic, a beautiful concept record about forlorn RariDashing.
RateYourMusic is a pretty awesome site. If you're an obsessive compulsive music nerd like I am, the charts and the lists and the ratings and the stats are all very appealing and cool and awesome. It's also got a long-standing history with the pony community—Freewave has done a lot of footwork with compiling lists and starter sets for a variety of genres including some of my favorites, and our very own fourths is an admin over there who recently helped make the site look a lot sleeker and shinier. Vylet however, made the grave mistake of taking an album about magical lesbian horses to number 1 on the 2021 Album of the Year lists, above the brutal prog rock masterpiece Cavalcade by British math rockers black midi and some orchestral jazz record that is also generally considered an exceptional piece of music (among some others—tyler, the creator's Call Me If You Get Lost, the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor record, and the world's second best slint tribute act's debut, to name a few).
Now this obviously could not stand, and our good friends over at RYM and on the internet forum known for containing all the most intelligent music discussion had a conniption. The RYM score got absolutely trashed by people flooding it with 0.5 star ratings (the lowest the site will allow that contributes to the overall ranking) and I even saw a review that called Vylet's music—for daring to infuse latin pop into her music on one of her songs—"insulting", all because of the addition of ponies. Really does feel like 2012 again. And ofc /mu/ is seething although I've seen some pretty keyed anons praising the album and I got some good discussion with some other folks about the possibility of some ponygaze/doom metal crossover. One anon did want to make that ponygaze album about Five Score Divided By Four, but no one is perfect I suppose.
All said, album may not be my AOTY so far (that probably goes to Backxwash's I LIE BURIED HERE WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES [EDIT 8/8/2021: the new Foxing album oh my fucking GOD]) but it's probably ending up in my top ten if not my top five (we'll see how the rest of the year plays out). Vylet pulled out all the stops, and this thing is a fucking fantastic embodiment of the hyperpop aesthetic not just in its unironic embrace of "cliched" musical influences like brostep, 2000s electropop, and bubblegum bass production, but also in its aesthetic abilities—wholehearted embrace of internet culture (it's a pony album, duh), unapologetic LGBTQ themes, and a very strong core message of liking whatever the fuck you want to like and telling anyone who breathes down your neck about it to fuck off.
11 years later people are still foaming at the mouth about seeing a cartoon pony. You love to see it.
It's unfortunate that that happened... I absolutely LOVED Antonymph in particular but the whole album was incredible
Man Antonymph was a nostalgia nuke
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holy shit you're still alive
Obsessive compulsive music nerds of the world, unite and take over
Wow they have ponies! :V
figures you'd like this
at least she's got an audience
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i like my loud noises, i like my soft noises, i like my melodies, i like my atonalities, i like my positive space, i like my negative space, i like my high fidelity, i like my low fidelity
music in general? i think i like it
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when we're in charge we'll finally be able to force everyone to listen to spins wheel post-industrial rapgaze with emodoom folkcore and eastern neoclassical witchwave overtones
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I'm eternal
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blessed
god, yo, the Why'd you have to call me verse in Isometrica, and that incredible breakdown at 2:04 in How To Kill A Monster, and the pop throwback of Honeymoon Phase & I Don't Need To Be Fixed, and honestly the latin pop surprise in hearing Protagonist Syndrome for the first time like yooooooooooo
If there are any lads mad enough to make ponygaze a thing I will produce the album pro bono please @ me
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I've got a busted amp and 15 effect pedals
let's do this thing
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;) send me ur stems let me EQ ur mixxx