A side project of Parannoul, their foray towards new age and ambient music comes off as too tame and familiar on 'Rough and Beautiful Place'.
Parannoul’s record was quite the blast ever since it was released last year. While bloated, unpolished, and underwritten, it did make the indie adored wave for everybody else. That reach allowed Parannoul to provide more reach with their music, even doing some collab work at some point last year.
And at the very start of 2022, they made an ambient and new-age record under a side project of Myfeverdream. When it comes to piano-focused ambient and new-age music, the thing that can get tough to deal with is what chord progressions will be used and how it will be structured down so that it won’t end up being an easy target to pigeonhole as a convenient, soundtrack ready ambient record. Because unfortunately, there are a lot of those kinds of music that end up being generic and predictable due to what chords and buildups are overused and beaten to death.
And for myfeverdream’s foray into ambient and new age music, those rubrics mostly check out in a lot of these tracks. The piano textures sound clean and soothing alongside the strings that accompany it, but the chords and progressions played in these tracks that go over 8 to 10 minutes get frustrating real fast, where the beauty gets diminished and tame when the progressions, buildups, and expected child crowd and bird samples sound generic and when the high frequencies get a bit too loud in the mix.
But for a record entitled ‘Rough and Beautiful Place’, there are those tendencies of varying embellishments and variations that do fill in and make the utopian soundscapes feel a bit grounded. While ‘Sprout’ sadly goes a bit too long, the subtle glitchy embellishments make it interesting, so does ‘Ether’ with its watery samples and fleeting chimes amidst the piano that keeps going in and out on different instances, ‘Rough and Beautiful Place’ with the spare bass, chimes, and tapping percussion, and especially ‘Circulation’ with its ancient chants, chiming bells, and calming harp tune that makes the soundscape sound so full and provides a refreshing air to this greenlit landscape.
And that is the weakest aspect of this record, where those embellishments that add a grounded and different color to these songs are used a bit too sparingly. Not letting it develop and add to the piano and violin melodies that are already going for a predictable and convenient grandness that just hollows out its efforts to feel big. And while it mostly works for this kind of new age music, it does not differentiate its patterns to make it mold a unique world of its own.
In essence, it does map out a world where the beauty still stands amidst the chaotic feuds of the past, but it’s a world that we’ve heard touched upon before by others… And unfortunately ends up being a hollow and uninteresting soundscape.
Favorite Tracks: Circulation, Ether, Rough and Beautiful Place
Least Favorite Track: Moment Is Now