ALBUM REVIEW: kajj - SELF

kajj makes a splash with his debut project, blending the aesthetics of electronica and trap into an astral, swirling, sci-fi experience.

Written by Ash

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE: As always, before reading this review, please support kajj by streaming SELF! As of now, the project is available only on Soundcloud.

 

I HAD THE PLEASURE of meeting Josh Driscoll exactly one time last semester before he departed for Prague this January. During that brief meeting, though, he made quite an impression on me, and we had a really great discussion about electronic music and production techniques. Color me surprised when I learned out that he'd released his debut project, titled SELF, at the beginning of this month! Reviewing a debut project is always exciting for me personally, and I was definitely very excited to give this one a proper look. Clocking in at just under a half hour, SELF is a tight collection of nine tracks, most of which embrace a hard-hitting, forceful, electro-trap sound anchored in huge synthesizers and thick bass foundations. The aesthetic of this album is definitely very distinct, and evokes comparisons to dark cyberpunk and sci-fi horror to me, with its heady, spacious synthesizer passages contrasted with hard-edged saw chords and punchy percussion. As a whole, SELF manages to be uniquely personal while also showcasing innovative sound design and creative production, making this a debut project that shows a lot of potential for the universe of kajj's music.

 

The album begins with "rise (Intro)", a vivid, epic piece that opens with the sounds of an alarm clock and footsteps across crunchy leaves. The sounds of walking are eventually paired with spacious yet sparse synth melodies and cinematic sound effects that give us a slow build-up into the rest of the album. The sound design and mixing here is really well done; nothing feels cluttered and everything shines through, which I think really contributes to the dramatic, movie trailer vibe I get from this opening track. After a short pause, the build-up releases with these resoundingly massive and resonant synth pad chords backed with subtle string plucks and a low sub bass that dial the epic feeling of this track up to eleven. In short, I really like this track as an opening to the album; it sets the album up to be a large-scale event right from the jump, and it certainly did a fine job hooking me in as a listener. The track ends with the sound of a closing door and a meditative exhale before a reversed synth arpeggio starts to fade in to take us into the next track.

 

"I've always had a ton of respect for songwriters that can say powerful things in powerful ways, so with SELF, I wanted to make something that said something of substance while sticking to my roots of electronic music." –Josh Driscoll a.k.a. kajj

 

The second track, "objective", begins with a seamless transition out of the minor key synth arpeggio that ended the intro track. This reversed sound is soon paired with hollow-sounding pad chords, shuffling drums, and a synth bell lead melody that weaves in and out of the established chord progression in an engaging way. The build-up here is done really well, which makes the downward-swooping hi-pass filter that takes us into the beat drop all the more satisfying; everything drops out and we collapse into a heavy 808 bass under an austere drum groove and warped synth fifths. The melodies here undulate and evolve in consistently entrancing ways, which meant that the track never stayed in one place for too long. Josh hits us with a bunch of cool little moments throughout—introducing new synths, adding extra reverb for brief moments, dropping things out at certain times—that add a lot to this track's sense of movement and dynamism. At the two-minute mark, a warped vocoder is introduced, adding a nice organic pseudo-vocal texture to this otherwise very synth-heavy track; a voice proclaims "where do we go?" over and over again underneath synth chords so thick they almost render the words unintelligible. Anyone who's kept up with this blog for a little while knows that a good vocoder is always the way to my heart, and this is no exception. Overall, as the first non-intro track on the album, "objective" makes for a tight showcase of what kajj is all about, as his trademark heavy beats, ingenious synth work, and dynamic production all come to the forefront here.

"drive" opens with another seamless transition out from "objective", this time through an extended sample of what sounds like tape noise that threads through both tracks. As much as I enjoy seamless transitions, the project is only available on Soundcloud at the time of my writing this review, and Soundcloud butchers the transitions between tracks a little, which does ruin them a little for me; I wish we could hear this project on a platform that supports seamless transitions in order to fully appreciate the sense of cohesiveness engendered by the way the tracks flow into each other. That aside, though, "drive" opens with a distorted synth arp that gradually becomes clearer until the minor key, hectic melody can be clearly discerned; I get SNES vibes from the arpeggiated chord progression outlined here, like boss music from an alternate reality '90s video game, and the whole aural presentation of the melody actually reminds me quite a bit of Dog Collar's music in its slightly deranged, relentless, uptempo vibe. Strange, creaking percussive sound effects in the left channel add a nice sense of rhythm leading up to the drop. The drop brings a wubby 808, variously contorted vocal chops, and a full-sounding kick drum to which everything else is heavily sidechained, creating a nice ducking effect that emphasizes the bounce of the track quite well. After the drums drop out, we get what sound like chanted battle cries emanating from far back in the space, accompanied with warlike drum hits that lead us back into the beat drop, this time with a sliding analog synth lead over the top. Josh's melodies on this track are truly great, and while I think the dynamism of his production is a strength across the whole project, it's particularly strong on this track. Each element is managed really well and Josh manages to keep feeding us new things at just the right pace to keep us interested, making "drive" one of my favorite tracks on the album.

 

On "pluto", an analog synth vox patch outlines a cinematic minor chord progression over a heavy synth bass in the track's opening. Soon, some Luigi's Mansion-type warped, frequency modulated leads take up the melody over some heavy 808 slides and flickering, sparse hi-hats. I really love the synth lead sound on this track and it conveys a somewhat whimsical yet haunting aesthetic that suits the vibe of this track perfectly. I also love the little moments of granular-sounding distortion and bitcrushing that use digital artifacting to add extra flavor. I love the retro Halloween vibes of this track, especially during the track's middle section, when some properly haunting chimes and synth strings build up a distinctly horror film-like atmosphere. I did notice some clipping in my monitors while listening to this track, mostly in the left channel where the hi-hats are, and the mix feels a bit cluttered to me overall, but ultimately the somewhat unpolished mix suits the off-kilter insanity of this track quite well, and so I'm not going to knock it too much! I still love this track as a showcase of innovative sound design and production choices, and "pluto" does a lot to show off kajj's creativity at its peak.

 

The following "who? (interlude)" begins with strange drones, panicked panting, and the sounds of running across an open field before lapsing into a dark, early-2010s crunk throwback beat anchored in a gloomy eighth-note bass lead and metallic percussion. The beat is definitely very distinct in its character, with a miry, thick groove that feels like wading through Jell-O, but I did feel like the little snippet we got was missing some of the dynamic and interesting production choices of the tracks before it. It's an interlude, so I suppose it fits the bill, but I guess I was hoping for a bit more of a genuinely off-the-wall, flash-in-the-pan sort of moment from this track's minute and a half of runtime. The mix also feels a little weird to me, with the 808 bass having this strange, high-frequency ring to it that got a tad distracting. Overall, though I didn't love this track immediately, I was interested to pick up on the parallels between this track and the intro track, which both contain the sounds of breathing and footsteps in a grassy field, but where the intro track was calm and meditative and relaxed, this one is panicked and frenetic, with a distinctly sci-fi horror tinge to it—so in the end, "who? (interlude)" did serve to intrigue me further and push me to decipher the message behind the album.

"I didn't want to be too on the nose with the conceptual side of the project, and therefore it was meant to be as open to interpretation as it could be without straying from the idea of saying something." –Josh Driscoll a.k.a. kajj

 

Muffled, LFO-filtered synth chords and reverbed, silvery percussion hits open the following track, "chapel". Eventually, sparse two-step hi-hats and a simple kick pattern pair with a syncopated, spiky synth bass to create a distinctively punchy sound that feels very much like a unique stylistic endeavor compared to the rest of the album. The hi-hats feel slightly out of time, a creative decision which I loved as a result of the track's unmistakably lilting, woozy groove. "chapel" feels like its own thing amidst the rest of the record's electro-trap stylistic leanings, and I really enjoyed getting to hear Josh's diverse sound selection in a new context. That said, we do return to more trap-influenced territory after the beat switch in the second half, which gifts us warped electric piano chords, an acoustic-sounding bass, and little G-funk synth whistle leads sliding in and out of the stereo field. I didn't expect this beat switch at all, and Josh's turn to a more chilled-out hip hop sound was really nice and made for a nice chill oasis in the middle of the album; I felt that Denzel Curry or maybe J Cole would be right at home over this sort of instrumental. "chapel" was definitely a huge standout track for me and I really respect it for expanding the comfort zone Josh had established on the previous tracks; by this point in the album, Josh has showed us he can make bangers, and so this hugely dynamic combination between druggy, edgy pseudo-dubstep and relaxed, easygoing trap/R&B ended up being one of my favorite tracks on the album.

 

"different" is based on a piano, with its transient attack removed and put through enormous reverb, partnered with drill hi-hats and a rhythmic, frequency-modulated bubbling noise for a subtly delirious atmosphere. There are definitely some cool moments of sound design here, but I found myself wishing that the track's somewhat sludgy groove had a clearer sense of progression and energy. I definitely picked up on some similarities between this track and "objective", which both boast similarly sparse grooves and austere instrumental foundations, and I wish this track's first half did a little bit more to differentiate itself and create its own unique sound. Even so, the beat switch halfway through is very nice, as we get a thick, textured synth sub bass and a loosely-vocal, distorted lead synth that sounds like a human voice caged behind the trappings of a cold, metallic vocoder for a cool vibe switch. The qualms that I'd had about this track were largely dispelled by this point; the vocoder/talkbox lead is just so damn cool that I can't really think about anything else! I suppose I had just wished that the first half of the track had adopted a similarly unique sound palette.

"CHAOS", the penultimate track on the album, opens with huge, sweeping minor key synth chords alongside warped, sliced fragments of what I think are vocal chops. We then get a two-step kick drum that occasionally hits really nice subdivisions alongside rhythmic bursts of static for a groove that immediately feels unmatched amongst the rest of the album. I really respect the decision not to lapse back into a more typical trap-style halftime groove; in contrast, the groove on this track feels totally unique and it's definitely its own thing. I also want to draw particular attention to the sound design on this track; the synth lead that enters around a minute and twenty seconds end boasts some crazy automated frequency modulation and panning that gives it a very peculiar nimble, quick-footed sound as it skitters around the stereo field. A robotic, digitized voice also enters occasionally, speaking sentences crushed just beyond the point of intelligibility. The track switches up around three minutes in, as the instrumental foundation shuffles around to include some tempered saw chords and a thick, bouncy 808 that crash in towards the listener in a massive wall of sound. I will say that the 808 sounds a little weird to me, almost like it's slightly out of tune, but that could be more related to harmonics than the actual fundamental tuning, since the 808 also sounds like it's got some strange high-frequency content in it that I found slightly distracting. Either way, I love the track's outro, as the repeated synth chords from the beginning of the track return, and become slowly more crushed and filtered until they fade away to nothing.

The album concludes with "complete (outro)". Tom Beyer would be proud of this track's opening, which combines speed-manipulated and pitch-shifted found sound samples in a way that feels very much like musique concrète to me. I'm not totally sure if I'm right about this, but these samples sound like they might even be from earlier tracks on the album, which, if they are, is just such a cool idea to me; I love it when albums reference back to earlier tracks in their outros, and I think it's a massively creative idea to call back to those tracks by literally including them as samples. We soon enter a spacious soundscape of large-scale arpeggiated synth chords augmented with sliced & looped vocal chops that made for a cool showcase of granular synthesis, building up to a massive beat drop anchored in bitcrushed, EDM-style saw chords hitting alongside minimal percussion that drives home the project's larger-than-life sound in one final moment of bombastic glory. Surprisingly, the album ends on a piano outro, which was a decision that threw me at first, but one that I ended up loving on repeated listens. Josh plays a richly emotional melody line supplemented with some tasteful non-diatonic chords in a truly interesting chord progression that ends off this very synth-heavy electronic project on a remarkably human-sounding and organic note. In case it's not clear already, I really, really enjoyed this track. The numerous switch-ups and different sections felt perfectly paced to me, and Josh showed off enough cool production techniques and sound design to prove that even at album's end, his bag of tricks isn't quite empty just yet.

In spite of all my positivity about SELF, I will fully admit that I didn't love this project on first listen. The project definitely has a very distinctive sound, pairing colossal synth sounds with heavy sidechained kicks and little bits of granular synthesis to create an atmosphere that feels a bit like a pixelated SNES rendering of a retrofuturistic sci-fi horror film. This soundscape was definitely very compelling at the project's beginning, and hooked me into the universe of kajj quite strongly. However, this sound palette started to get a little worn out for me, especially during the second half of the record, and I find myself wishing that kajj had employed a wider array of synth sounds and processing tricks in order to create a more diverse sound palette across the whole album.

 

"In the case of this album, I wanted to make something that depicts the turbulent relationship I seem to have with my musical process; that the journey that comes with making and refining the musical process is not always easy… there are times when you can feel on top of the word, that you are truly an individual and participating in expanding the horizons of music as it is known, and others where you feel like a dot in an endless sea of dots, struggling to find individuality in the art you create; struggling to make yourself as an artist happy." –Josh Driscoll a.k.a. kajj

 

Additionally, I am unashamed to admit that I completely failed to grasp the meaning behind the album on my first listen, and as a result, I found myself really wishing for a more obvious deeper meaning behind the whole thing. Tracks like "chapel" and "CHAOS" tease stylistic progression that might have done more to take me to new emotional territory had they not been paired with tracks like "different" and "who? (interlude)", which feel like they regress towards sounds we've already explored in the first few tracks. Because of this, I wasn't sure how to feel about the sequencing and pacing of this record. This is probably my own personal biases and preconceptions rearing their ugly heads a little, but I found myself wishing that the project had a clearer narrative throughline, with a more cohesive progression from the sound at the start of the record to the sound at the end; I like albums that outline a clear journey, the end of which sees the listener having ended up in a very different place than where they began. I truly didn't get it at all until I read Josh's explanation of the album, where he explains that SELF is a depiction of the stress inherent in the process of creating art—at which point it made total sense! Art is messy and being happy with what you create is never an easy task, and I'd even venture to say that that precarious balance between the creation of art and the artist's own happiness is what drives a lot of us; I know it drives me. Ultimately, the fact that I didn't grasp the meaning of SELF right away isn't a criticism of the record. Perhaps I might have been happier in the short term if the record had literally spelled it out for me, but I like it better this way—raw, uneasy, sometimes unsettling—just like the process of creating art in the first place.

"Aesthetically, the project is meant to be storybook-like… The first three tracks… are meant to represent creating intentioned art that the artist themself is happy with. 'Pluto' marks the end of this part of the cycle, with the interlude 'who?' marking the descent into the uneasiness that comes with [this part of the cycle of creating art]… 'chapel' and 'different' represent an unwillingness for an artist to accept that they are not happy with their art… leading to 'CHAOS' representing trying to force art… This leads to the outro, 'complete', a bittersweet callback to 'objective' and what it represents that leads back to the first track, beginning the cycle as abruptly as it ended. All of this is modeled after my own feelings towards the art I create and is therefore deeply personal. This is another reason I wanted to be as subtle as possible with the conceptual side of the project." –Josh Driscoll a.k.a. kajj

 

At the end of the day, though, none of those first-listen criticisms of mine are dealbreakers for me, because the second listen was where it really clicked for me, and the third listen was when I realized how much I actually enjoyed this record. Josh's ability to marry the aesthetics of EDM and trap into a bass-heavy banger package is remarkably strong, and he flexes that particular skill on a number of tracks on this album. His sound design, while it did start to wear a little thin for me, created a very distinct universe in which this album lives, populated with cyberpunk neon lights under pitch-black night skies and UFOs whizzing by overhead; the overall "album experience" was very strong, and I did genuinely feel transported to kajj's dimension for the duration of the album's runtime. With only a couple exceptions, Josh's sense of pacing in a track is excellent; he manages the dichotomy between buildup and drop with an expert touch, and the constant addition and subtraction of sounds helps to create tracks that consistently undulate and evolve in the pursuit of remaining constantly entertaining. In any case, SELF was a very strong debut project that showcases an excellent grasp of how to make really good electronic music while also being deeply personal and heartfelt, and I am more than happy to continue playing this project on repeat and staying tuned for whatever kajj releases next!

Personal enjoyment score: 8 out of 10

 

Standout tracks: "drive", "pluto", "chapel", "CHAOS", "complete (outro)"