Com Truise Galactic Melt

Com Truise makes 1980s inspired music, which, given the vast amount of 1980’s inspired music available at the moment, almost seems like an irrelevant descriptor. To say he makes it exceptionally well would be as much of a lie to say he makes it poorly. He takes a big, analog synth tone and pairs it with high-in-the-mix, sometimes overpowering drum machines. If you’ve got a nice pair of speakers, it’s pretty satisfying to feel that thump in your chest. If you’re listening on earbuds, at least half the album experience is lost.

He takes a page from Boards of Canada, specifically Roygbiv off their landmark Music Has The Right To Children. The previously mentioned loud beats and synth leads couple with surreal vocal samples and choppy arpeggios, leading to a fairly uniform and homogeneous sound. Most of the same tricks are pulled on each song, and it doesn’t leave much room for variety. Sometimes the beats will have an extra kick to them, or the song structures will change up, but the keyboard tone is the same throughout the record. It walks a very fine line between intriguing and boring, and frequently drifts between the two.

His music is similar to Ford and Lopatin’s, but lacks a lot of their goofy personality and over the top musical antics. There are no individually bad songs, but there is a severe lack of variety. It has a very specific direction, but commands no specific mood. Last year’s Com Truise release, the Cyanide Sisters EP, showed a reasonably high amount of promise, but this (mostly) fails to deliver. He’s just as good at making the same music, but he hasn’t discovered how to write more than one kind of song.