Skip Garden Angel and Mow the Lawn

This album made me hate independent artists. Garden Angel is a project by Maisy a self
described transfemme and autistic. According to her Spotify bio she is a “Bedroom Emo
pioneer.” But the only thing she is pioneering is a reason for me to buy earplugs. This album
encapsulates what it means to be derivative local in a music scene. No originality, using simple
basic riffs to put her less than subpar voice on. The vocals on this are just wretched, between
her spoken word where she attempts to sound like a valley girl with the tonality of a middle
school boy pretending to make her voice deep. The production on songs like Scream 4 my
Ice cream” have some clear hyperpop influence. But just listen to some of these lyrics on that
same track. Big hyperpop (which isn’t even that big) normally has the stylistic
structure of a pop song, catchy repeatable lyrics. Hyperpop blew up big on Tik Tok in 2020, some
notable figures like 100gecs and WHOKILLEDXIX took over Tik Tok because of its short media
format and the ability to get stuck in peoples’ heads. This song makes a fool out of hyperpop or
dance pop or whatever you wanna call overproduced music with wacky autotune. In her Spotify
it notes that her songs are “mostly improvised”, which is like wow okay your songs are
improvised really impressive…? What outcome do you want out of saying your music is mostly
improvised, bands like Dinosaur JR earned the respect of so many bands because they never
do a solo the same way twice, its a display of creativity and technical ability. But for her it seems
like she’s using this card as one or two things, one the ability to negate criticism because since
they are improvised they aren’t meant to be taken seriously, or the ability to credit herself as a
superior artist. I think this is also just a bad way to represent yourself because you self identify
as apart of the Emo genre and scene which is founded on artists who pour their soul into your
music. The rest of this album are just weirdly produced trash that attempts to be experimental
but lacks any appeal. Even if it was attempting to be experimental other artists have done the
same before, and better and just contributes to this heap of trash. There’s no clear pattern or
theme in this album, every track is uniquely derivative in its own way and this album sucks.
-10/10
I have no favorite songs.