18 Carat Affair – High Emotion
Recommendation: ☀☁☁
Released in February 2012, High Emotion is the ante-penultimate album by 18 Carat Affair, a notable member of the Fortune 500 catalogue. 18 Carat Affair’s music lies in retro-styled synthwave, vaporwave, and hypnagogic pop. Tracks are typically sampled in a lo-fi aesthetic with plenty of reverb and gated percussion that evokes eighties production styles, often paired with a pink/purple and early home-computer graphics to further the aged presentation.1 Songs frequently last for a minute or less, providing little vignettes of a warped world.
Around half of the songs on High Emotion feature vocals, and they’re often soporifically slowed down to create a drowsy effect. It’s not unlike the earliest forms of vaporwave, but this isn’t ECCOJAMS, and the goal isn’t to elicit the uncanny valley: it’s to further the dated milieu in which High Emotion resides. It’s an album that will assuredly please those lovers of old-school synth music.
Tracklist
1. Fashion – (2:16)
2. Personal Evaluation 3 – (1:00)
3. Random Select – (1:00)
4. The Set Up – (1:12)
5. Industrial Average – (1:00)
6. Frequency Syndicate – (1:04)
7. 4th Dynasty Pharaohs – (0:52)
8. Photo Romance – (2:01)
9. $19.95 – (0:40)
10. Live at 5 – (0:58)
11. 816-XXOO (Karen) – (0:34)
12. Convincing People – (0:49)
13. Our Parents Money – (1:14)
14. Soft Talk – (1:35)
15. Theory 10 – (1:04)
16. High Emotion – (2:36)
1This album probably has one of my favorite album artworks in the vaporwave genre of music. It’s wonderfully retro.