Tripecac - Mockolate

This album is shorter than usual, due to a seemingly endless series of interruptions and delays. The year started slowly, with my wasting investing a lot of time researching software to replace SONAR (which had been discontinued in late 2017). In the end, I decided to stick with SONAR until it stops working. That [non]decision cost me many hours which could have been spent making music!

By early July I had only completed four songs. We then went on a trip for six and half weeks. When we got back, the girls were no longer enrolled in their after-school gym classes, so I lost my usual two-hour music blocks.

In the fourth quarter of the year, the girls joined the coding club, which gave me a two-hour music block again. But then I had to upgrade to a new computer, which consumed more time. Sickness, holidays, and coding club cancellations meant I only had a few afternoons here and there to work on music. Somehow I managed to squeeze out another three songs. By then, I had lost any musical momentum, and felt rusty and rushed; you can probably tell that from the songs.

Speaking of the songs, all of them have vocals. They're silly and mostly improvised, but occasionally catchy. The idea was originally to "mock" various things happening at the time, but over time I neglected to do even that, and the writing dwindles into babbly nothingness. In other words, they're par for Tripecac.

The first four songs are the most focused and polished. Each seems to revisit a different period of Tripecac production. "Cakewalking Dead"'s drum machine and roomy production remind me of Where's My Muse. "Immockulate"'s dueling vocals hearken back to Convenience. "Avefadi" sounds like it could have been on The Hermit, with over-distortion, [fake] sax, and sped-up vocals. "Roomhaven" feels like one of those early soft synth tests on Out the Margins; it starts off meek and awkward but then comes together in a nice funky groove towards the end.

The final three songs sound like a rushed "sequel". They're less chronologically adventurous in terms of production (all sound relatively recent), but are even messier and sloppier in terms of writing, performance, and mixing. "To Myself" is over-compressed, "Weigh Bee Hind" is over-repetitive, and "Codada" is over-stupid. On the positive, there are some decent solos buried in the mess.

Oh well. Hopefully next year will be less time-pinched, so that I can crank out more and better music. I think I've said that before. But this time I really mean it!

Seriously.