by Michael McCarthy
The female solo artist Lykke Li has released an “inverted” version of her last album, EYEYE. And by inverted, what means is simply that they the tracks are all backwards. They just took the songs, switched them to backwards, and released it. Talk about a lame way to make a new album. That’s as bad as these artists who are released “slowed down” and “sped up” versions of their albums like Billie Eilish. That’s incredibly lazy, too. They literally just take an album and slightly speed up or slow down the tracks and release it like that. Anyone with half a brain could use a program like Audacity, which is free, to sped up or slow down songs or play them backwards. These are hardly difficult things to do. And I don’t do them because I want to hear songs sound the way they sounded when they were recorded. I don’t need to hear some version of your album where you speed up a few beats per minute. If you want to release a version of your album with the songs being faster, how about you actually go into the studio and record a faster version of the album. You know, actually sing it faster yourself, not just use a stupid program to speed up your voice a bit. If you’re going to actually try to get your fans to pay 40 dollars for a vinyl version of your sped up album, you ought actually record yourself singing faster versions of the songs. If you’re just going to tinker with it slightly with a program that any novice can use and try to charge people all kinds of money for it, that’s what I call milking the fans. Putting out a lame product just because you know many of your fans will buy anything you release and will thus buy it.
As for the Lykke Li album, it sounds better than I expected it to sound, but I still can’t listen to it. Things just sound weird when you play songs backwards. And I think that, for me, when I listen to this backwards Lykke Li album, my brain keeps trying to “hear” the normal versions of the songs. I’ll recognize a song but then in my mind it starts playing like it normally does, meanwhile my ears are actually hearing the backwards version. And it kind of stresses me out. Plus, all backwards songs kind of end up sounding the same. Or at least so similar that I find it impossible to listen to an entire album like that. I did listen to Lykke Li’s album like that once and that will be the only time I ever listen to that entire album from front to back. I doubt I’ll even listen to another song from it again. It was interesting to hear some of them backwards once just out of curiosity but I find songs lose their ability to hook you when they’re played backwards so I just don’t find myself wanting to hear backwards songs ever again once I’ve heard them once.
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