So Called Life

Now this is what I call playing it safe. With a title that instantly reminded me of that turgid mid-90’s angsty teen TV series My So-Called Life, I was hoping that Gaudium would be following the trend of the semi-decent Nordic Nature.

In short, he doesn’t. The standard psyreviews moan about progressive music is that a lot of the time, it’s ploddy music with nice sounds and spud-u-like layering that sees a hihat (or something) appear once every 32 beats. Gaudium fits this bill perfectly.

The production, as one might expect from Iboga, is tight and gleaming. The sounds themselves are well-rounded, with a good mix of punching clarity and bottomend warmth. No problems there: but when we sit back to wait and see what Gaudium does with all that, things become thin to the point of near-transparency.

There has been debate before as to whether music that calls itself progressive actually ‘progresses’. Under normal circumstances the jury would be out, but on So Called Life the answer is a little clearer. Nothing here progresses in any meaningful way – at the end of a track, you’re just back where you started.

In trying to pick out that standout track-or-two, I noticed that no less than four of the ten tracks here have an almost identical acidline at the 5:30 mark. And I think this statistic speaks volumes: there’s enough ideas here for a stunning 12” or two, but over a whole album you do start to wonder whether somebody up there is taking the piss.