Sometimes, you just have to check an artist out because last.fm says you should. That’s what happened here. That’s it. I was browsing my last.fm reccomendations (which have been taken over by a lot of folk punk as of late—I’m starting to find that genre can be a bit annoying) and this was on the 5th page or something.
The members of Blackbird Blackbird do two things really well. They’re great at coming up with really stupid band names, and creating chillwave. I’ve written about how chillwave often comes off as uninspired and lazy to me, but Blackbird Blackbird knows exactly how to make this controversial genre work. Naturally, chillwave is supposed to sound laid back and relaxed, but there’s a very thin line between creating music that sounds chill and music that just sounds bored. BB have got it down, though.
The beats are awesome, the synths are effective, and the vocals give off that perfect relaxed-sitting-in-front-of-the-ocean sound. In other words, this is exactly what chillwave is meant to sound like.
What bothers me the most about much of the chillwave out there is song length. If you’ve listened to a few albums of the genre, you know that songs can go on for way too long, often exhausting any catchiness that they had, and becoming really repetitive. On Summer Heart, the longest track clocks in at just under three minutes. This is a great way to do chillwave. If you stumble upon a boring track, it’s over before you know it. Plus, great songs don’t have the opportunity to be destroyed by their length.
Swole Ear 
Leave a Reply