Cassette Review // Vlimmer "XIIIIII (16)" (Blackjack Illuminist Records)

€5 //

Edition of 15 //

https://blackjackilluministrecords.bandcamp.com/album/xiiiiii-16 //

If you're wondering why this Vlimmer cassette is called "16" it is because it is the sixteenth of its type.  I'm not sure how many cassettes there will be from Vlimmer, but I hope someone out there is collecting them all so that we reach a point of maybe a hundred they'll have to designate a rack just to Vlimmer.  I don't really know how Vlimmer continues to create such great music without me feeling like it's too much, but perhaps that's why I don't really create music myself (not for the public ears anyway)

Right away you hear the sounds of dark synthwave, which maybe could just be darkwave.  It feels like Oingo Boingo without the dancing or even just The Cure.   But then on the second song we get bigger beats.  Synth comes crashing down like lightning and it's just a different vibe.   It's funny to me, but each of these songs can stay within that general synthwave idea but yet sound so different from each other.   Even the last song on the first side has that John Hughes movie feeling to it that I love.

When you flip this one over you'll hear a different sound.  Something about the song "Taubheit" just hits differently.   Perhaps it reminds me a little bit of The Killers and maybe being that I feel like I've traveled from the past to a more modern sound makes me feel that way as well.  Can you exist in both the past and present?  I believe that Vlimmer can.    The final song just comes out as a fuzzy bop, like if The Ramones made a synthwave album for some reason.   Once again it hits differently yet all the songs still feel tied together somehow.

At the end of this cassette I'm left thinking that I really wish there was a genre of movies that still existed that was as good as the John Hughes movies.   I don't think anyone in film has that same power right now, but this cassettes makes me nostalgic for John Candy as well.   But I also feel like this music is just such a great connection between the past and the present and maybe that's what it's all about: maybe that's the future.   Being able to cross all sense of time within music just seems to make your music timeless.