But what is authenticity anyway anymore, when all things in the world are duplicable, filtered, upgraded, endlessly recombinable? That is the question which, though faintly humming, is never absent in Cloned and Upgraded, Insert Soul Here by Rellyo Bambini. It is never given to the form of a thesis or a concept that you are expected to work out. Instead, it is lived in like a personal anxiety, which continues to re-emerge in solitude, when you are alone with your thoughts. Something desperate here is very human, as though the album is pleadingly attempting to drag itself out of the machine, wondering what it is like to be alive when the world begins to glossy and plastic, when being connected is a simulation.
The sound of Bambini exists between the realms that are difficult to define but are easy to experience. Psychedelic hip-hop has dark electronic pulses drifting through, flashes of futuristic rock slicing, making this wide open sense, without the emotional centre ever being forgotten. Everything is smooth, deliberate, nearly radiant. The electronic components glitter, though they never ingest what is organic beneath. There’s still breath in it. His lyrics base the high-concept thoughts on something tangible, and not so much like sci-fi abstractions but something that you have actually experienced, even though you may not have been able to name it then.
A window into this weird, familiar world is opened by each of the tracks. Bossy Pants goes where it is going with its purpose and momentum alone. Crypto Kids is a direct confrontation of digital overload through a grimace of cold, cynical irony, piercing the monetary preoccupation of the web and the disenfranchisement of the youth with biting, dry sarcasm. Oh Those Sexy Stilettos, walks in that cyberspace gritty, cyberpunk strut, so, Whirlwind Chatter, will not sit down, is spinning and spinning, constantly changing shape, never quite allowing you to get hold. It is a unique style of Big Bad Love – Rebirth Edition, which incorporates genuine emotional depth with pop-funk charm, to be somehow sincerely moving and memorable at the same time.
The real difference that this project has is its silent service to humanity within all the artifice. Bambini creates these soundscapes with neon lights and future fractured and futuristic, the creation of sci-fi and cyberpunk dreams, yet he stocks them with very real emotions: with the love that hurts, with the loss that lingers, with the urge to survive even in spaces where everything is synthetic. The melodies stay with you. The lyrics are never hollow and insincere. The heart does not go away behind the circuitry. Cloned and Upgraded, Insert Soul Here is effective since it is searching, it is reaching back to what it remembers. There is still a beat under all the imitations and models, and it remains distinctly, purely, human.
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