His third album might provide a sense of polish on the production side, but it’s sadly marred with underwhelming issues across the board. His longest album to date, ‘Red Grasshoppers’ recalls back to a straightforward indie folk and slacker rock sound that does not hold up consistently from across the board, resulting in small hops that don’t go anywhere remarkable.
Back in 2022 when Quiet Commotion put out ‘All Others Strange’, there was a chilling rawness complimenting his lyrical musings and pensive vocal tones that’s so deeply anchored with these fickle instrumentation boxed in with a frosty temperature around it. The overall result is a step up from his past project where the additional textures and tones are able to imbue his vocals and his poetry with a quaintness that’s calming but is also melancholic once the details are shown with bluer hues. Now, moving past that project two years later, Quiet Commotion continues to wander forth the forests of emotional depth that he carries through since the beginning, eventually manifesting onto ‘Red Grasshopper’.
In ‘Red Grasshopper’, Quiet Commotion approaches his sonic tapestry with a straightforward edge, leaning on the shaggy indie folk and slacker rock with the uplift on mixing and mastering that overall represents the project as perhaps Quiet Commotion’s most crisp sounding project to date, where all instrumental and vocal details are left breathing openly in their respective areas. The burnish melodies that coalesce to the post-chorus jittery guitar tones jeer apart ‘Staying In’, just before Quiet Commotion’s vocals start to break at the seams, quaking and shivering in the final minute of the song. It continues forth on ‘Röken du andas’ and ‘When It’s Over You’ll Agree’, the slow burn patterns alongside Quiet Commotion’s monotonal vocal tone do manage to work amidst the instrumental fervor of the former and the brass horn section on the latter, adding more textural and tonal embellishments to the project. These cuts do get overshadowed somehow by the rest of the album’s rather odd production choices that don’t exactly flatter Quiet Commotion’s voice and can eventually start making the project to be rather clunky. The lo-fi filter added onto his voice at the end of ‘Ghostly Wind’ doesn’t really do anything to elevate his expression, especially when the rawer recordings on cuts like ‘Clot’ and ‘Red Grasshoppers’ show that he doesn’t even that filter to begin with. Additionally, there is an unevenness towards the vocal mix and the drum textures that only allow the project to stumble from track to track, unveiling a sense of inconsistency that doesn’t become flattering at the end of the project.
But it’s not just the production that starts to stick out like a sore thumb in the project, because frankly, the album structure alongside the lack of instrumental variation does kick the project down even further, especially toward the melodic compositions that get tempered down considerably. Loaded with two 10-minute cuts - one of them being a full-on instrumental passage - and a few abbreviated songs on the front half, the momentum immediately starts to shamble apart and only gets tightened up a bit once it goes to the second half, leading to the album becoming a bit too long and front-loaded for its own good. It doesn’t really help out that the straightforwardness of the instrumentation pales out the melodies and the vocals on the wayside, and given the fact that there is a sense of haphazard decisions throughout its overall sound that unveils the cramming of past sonic ideas from Quiet Commotion’s past records within some of the song’s refined recordings, it just felt dispiriting. The reason why ‘All Others Strange’ manages to work well amidst the limitations on the vocals and instrumental polish is the fact that there is the inclusion of consistent frigid recordings and haunting piano tones that pick up more somber, chilling melancholy in the melodies that are quite well-composed, so it’s just rather disappointing that the stripped back plaintive acoustics and percussions paired with underwhelming melodies just doesn’t do anything in the long run.
Of course, that unevenness does make a bit of sense in the writing, leaning towards familiar territory for Quiet Commotion. Portraying a sense of loss of closeness within a relationship that’s starting to become ever so distant, leading to the protagonist reflecting on that fading relationship as he starts feeling lonesome and emotionally withered, shown through the nature imagery in the poetry that acts as metaphors towards that fading state of the relationship. Ending the arc with ‘Sickle Strength’ that describes the relationship that has finally withered away and as a result puts the protagonist in numbed and cold behavior, just like the different faces of different men showing their dead-eyed expressions to everybody they meet.
While this project stands as Quiet Commotion showing some polish, it ends up being his most fractured project to date. He might find some decent landing with the polish of sound, but the leaps he goes through the straightforward rustic folk and shambling rock end up wandering afloat rather than focusing deeply, where he finds himself admiring various angles of the bigger picture rather than finding the smaller details that could’ve made the project pick up those small notes that lead to large emotional and compositional potencies that the project just doesn’t have in the same way unlike ‘All Others Strange’. The grasshopper may be able to hop around and take in the wild expanse around it, but its gentle footing slips this time around, unable to fully stick its landing and unable to encapture the rest of the beauty that it sees.
Favorite Tracks: ‘Staying In’, ‘Roken du Andas’, ‘Moss I Trampled’, ‘When It’s Over You’ll Agree’
Least Favorite Track: ‘Clot’