Catlights – Triangle

Recommendation: ☀☁☁

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Take home some hardvapour, throw it in a pot, add some dreampunk and a bit of a vaporwave – and baby, you’ve got a stew going.

But wait a second… This was made in 2010. Before all of that. Before any of it was really a concept, honestly.

What???

Triangle is the debut release from Catlights, a project by .mp3neptune that began in a concentrated effort to create “hard” music that contrasts with the “delicate melody” of the artist’s other works. The result is an album that hits up there with stuff from Antifur and HVRF. Most of the tracks follow a general formula of a chopped-and-screwed melody that’s layered with compressed beats. For example, “Inverted” begins with a short sample that loops faster and faster before launching into a dubstep-influenced melody with the electronic music equivalent of a breakdown. Opener “I Found a Murder Tape at the Thrift Store” has vaportrap hi-hats going so fast by the mid-point that they sound like static. Also of note is the ambient-ish “Drifting”, which has a weird dark ambient feel with low bass rumbles and equalized beats.

Asura Revolver calls Triangle a work of “almost chaotic plunderphonics”, which isn’t too far off the mark for the glitchy nature of a lot of these tracks. “Team Workout” samples an athletic trainer’s admonishments with a ton of degradation and screw, creating a pretty awesome blend of hardvapour and classic-style vaporwave. “Forum Raid” could be at home on a Hotline Miami tribute album, with its sinewy synthwave melody and high-bpm tempo. Ending track “Wait” features a distorted vocal lead that sounds somewhat like a fucked-up version of the intro spoken word bit to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – and I can’t believe I just made that reference.

As you can tell by this article, Triangle is one of those albums where every single song could use a line because of how well .mp3neptune has done at creating an album that’s different enough on each new track without being totally discursive – something that’s not easy to do for a genre like hardvapour. It’s also gotta be mentioned that this thing was produced years before any of those genre tags were even a thing – Triangle predates hardvapour and dreampunk by several years, yet its official release in mid-2017 could not have been more timely. Crazy, weird, and perfectly suitable for its half-hour package.

 

Tracklist

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1. I Found a Murder Tape at the Thrift Store – (4:18)
2. Inverted – (3:20)
3. Team Workout – (2:53)
4. Chemical Burns – (3:00)
5. Forum Raid – (3:29)
6. Intermission – (0:46)
7. I Guess So – (7:05)
8. Dairy Farm – (2:03)
9. Drifting – (4:15)
10. Wait – (2:28)

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¹Taken from the Asura Revolver blurb for the album.