Note: Red Is Not My Actual Skin Color

Tending bar in the winter… the end result of the incessant washing of hands that is the mark of a responsible bartender… not pictured - alcohol rebounding off of ice cubes and hitting my hands...

Sadly, if I had a good camera, this would look worse!

… speaking of (slight reprise)…

Still Here, Just Silent

It's taken me a while to figure out, but, yeah, Ecco Jams. The Jam.

Most of the rest of vaporware, not so much. I understand the gesture, understand the nostalgia, miss the bright techno future-vision of the capitalism of the late 1980s/early 1990s, but a lot of the music seems to get by just on the mere gesture of evoking that era. As if simply the choice to compose in a certain style were enough all by itself, with the actual composition a mere afterthought.

This (in the spirit of the original Lopatin work) is dope:

This…

Gets a bit close to this…

To the point that the critique is almost lost and the composer has just substituted demo tracks of late 1980s synthesizers for, say, Italo disco or 1960s garage rock, as the thing to sound like with no desire to communicate anything beyond the aesthetic predilections of the composer… Meh.

I like how I am so late in bringing this up. It's going to be weird when the late 1990s are cool again. That era is even more indistinct to me than any of the worst years of the last decade.

Bronxlyn

Existed.