I hope you guys are ready for more ‘Chiptunes = WIN: Volume 5’ album reviews, because I’m here to talk about tracks 52-99! We start off with- wait, no, no, that’s a bold-faced lie; there aren’t any more tracks on the album. I can feel your disappointment, but since I’ve been on sabbatical working on a top secret project for the blog (more on that later this month), I was able to jump right on a brand-new release from one of my favorite West Coast chiptune cats as soon as I saw it happened! Pedro Silva, AKA Slime Girls, has been picking up speed with the releases lately, and August 1st marked the release of his newest album, ‘don’t forget.’
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Art by Chu Nap (ghostspaces.tumblr.com)
As a kid, when I longed for the feeling of summer, I’d go hunt for old beach rock albums. These days? It’s Slime Girls. Each album consistently nails that wistful nostalgic feeling of summer perfectly. Even though the overall production style and aural palate of the Slime Girls’ sound has moved from the harsher, more traditionally chippy LSDJ/Famitracker to the smoother sounds of Ableton and Reason, the same sort of æsthetic shows through in his writing. There are some stock instrument voices used to get the easy connection to tropical islands and sandy places in this album, such as the steel drum effects and an almost sitar-like bit which is evocative of n64-era action platformer desert levels. Instead of just relying on those to get the listener into the headspace of thinking about sandy and/or beachy places, Pedro keeps it going with expert transitions from movement to movement in the song as well as some extremely well placed light but tight percussion (specifically the snare hits/claps, as well as the super speedy drum hits which are all the rage these days). Actually, specifically with regards to the percussion on the album, there’s a wonderful balance of very automated straight drums and drums and claps that sound like a live recording, which is a healthy and refreshing change of pace.
I realize it’s only a five track album, so talking about two of the tracks in particular is almost talking about the whole album, but there are two tracks that really have to be spotlighted: Vacation Wasteland Z and NEAR/FAR.
Earlier, I mentioned the evolution of the Slime Girls sound as the production medium changed, and what better way to highlight that than with a reimagining of the main track from his first EP‽ According to the liner notes on Bandcamp, this track was mostly completed in 2014, save for the addition of the samba whistle bit – which is honestly the best addition to anything. The speedy bit in this song gives me life. Admittedly the rest of it is great – it’s always curious and cool to hear an LSDJ song with an expanded sound palate, but a total rework like the breakdown in the second half of this song is just…well, imagine there’s a bunch of those 100s and “just right” hand emojis after this. People still do that, right?
The album closes on this epic shoegazey ballad which, unlike the rest of the album, plays around with dissonance and points that border on being walls of sound, only to be resolved into a calm contemplative moment complete with seagulls and crashing waves. To borrow Pedro’s own words from the liner notes,
“I think I wrote the initial idea (the first verse and the pretty arpeggio section during the break) for this song back in 2013 but it never really launched off the ground and it wasn’t until I heard Kara’s Walk Home’s “Weekend! Party With Your Friends” that I finally got some ideas for how to proceed with it, and then it turned into this monster of a song, the longest I’ve ever written. Which is fitting since every KWH song is 40 years long so hey.”
I fully recommend you go read the rest of what he wrote, since there’s a lot about this song there.
So there you go! This gets the Adam Seats stamp of approval as the Official Summer EP Everyone Needs. You can go buy this album for five American moneydollars, or for a little more than twice that you can get all 7 of Slime Girls’ releases. Scientifically speaking, that’s a stupid good deal, and if you want to see Slime Girls live, be sure to head to Freq.Fest.SF later this month!
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