This is the third studio album from American singer and former child actor in movies like The Goonies and Stand By Me, Corey Feldman. He has ventured into music before, but it has not exactly met with any critical or commercial success. But the dude has been working on this album for 10 years before its release. 10 YEARS! This album even had a Kickstarter to fund it with a goal of $105,000 of which it only managed to get just under $15,000 of. Ouch! But despite everything, in 2016, Angelic 2 The Core was released unto the world. Enter our next character in this 3-act play, the Melon Lord himself, peace be upon him, Mr. Anthony Fantano. He took a listen to this album as it came out because it’s his job and it was so bad it broke him and his review style! We get to watch a 50-minute reaction of sorts as he goes through the album track by track and we get to listen along through his tinny MacBook speakers as he descends into an indescribable madness. This is how I and many others were introduced to this album: the worst album of 2016, later the worst album of the 2010s! For a while I was scared of the opening of Bring The Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture, an actually good song, because it reminded me too much of the song, Negativity. Now we get to Act 3 of our tragic tale. For those of you who don’t follow my TikTok or Instagram (@martelinsmusic for both, by the way), I leave nearly every other album up to fate. The music gods were not in my favour last week and they spaketh thus: Review Corey Feldman – Angelic 2 The Core. I knew that it would be the largest tithe I would have to pay to the gods and that this day would no doubt come eventually. So after beating around the bush for a couple days, being as optimistic as I possibly could be, I strapped in for the ride of a lifetime, and wow, I got everything I bargained for and more. This album is, without a doubt, the worst album I have ever heard this year so far, and it’s not even close. Production is garbage, composition is garbage, singing is hot garbage and lyrics are more garbage. It’s tempting to just play the album for you to show you just how bad it is, but Melon Man already did that. Let’s just talk about this…whatever this is…and maybe, just maybe, we can find solace together. Apologies for lack of detail here, I just really don’t want to listen to this album again. Let’s go…
PRODUCTION
Production is bad. Mixing is horrible, sound quality is horrible, all of it. It’s perhaps the worst I’ve heard from a studio album. The vocal recording quality just goes out the window fast, especially with the skits. It reminds me of old YouTube skits from 2007 complete with acting and cinematography that would belong on the movie, Birdemic. The instruments are buried into themselves. There are points where Corey’s vocals are buried in the mix. Some of them are entirely buried like the front half, and some are fine in the beginning (as fine as Angelic 2 The Core can be) and then are buried in the mix for some reason. This is nice if you don’t want to hear so much of Corey Feldman anymore, but I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s clearly a lot going on with this record and none of it pans out well. It just turns into this noisy muddle thanks to the mixing and sound quality of each instrument from guitars to saxes to vocals to electronics. Nearly everything just doesn’t sound good. And the worst is when Corey’s trying to go epic like on Working Class Hero, the closer and John Lennon cover, but he just shoots himself in the foot with weak production that makes the track sound weaker. It’s like if the fog from St. Anger got even thicker. This whole album needs a massive overhaul when it comes to production.
What’s there to be said about effects? A large theme about my opinion on this album is “At least Corey Feldman tried”. At least, with this album, there is something there that’s creative. But that unfortunately backfired as well. Sometimes, there’s no stereo sound, and sometimes its inclusion makes me want to wash my ear canals like on 4 Bid In Love (God what an awful title). For example, the autotune is handled so poorly on Lovin Lies that it makes his vocals worse and the lyrics he’s singing are less and less intelligible. Effects just make this album seem like even more of a mess than it already is. There’s either too much going on, which the production absolutely botches, or it’s minimal enough to see all the elements get weakened and/or exposed as terrible.
COMPOSITION
Speaking of elements, what’s going on here? Composition is just a mess. An unmitigated mess. Again, I apologize if I don’t go into much detail as I would normally do about this album’s instruments because to do so, I’d have to listen to this album multiple times, I’ll sure as hell try though… The electronics are ok at first, then get grating over time. Synths are kind of the same way. Guitars are super cheesy on the back half, but not in a fun way. Bass has that cheesy vibe to it as well, or it’s completely invisible. Pianos are either flat or play into the cheesy vibe. It all culminates on that jazz (I think) song, We Wanted Change. If I showed that to some of the people in my life who are mad into jazz, I’m pretty sure they’d never want to talk to me again. It’s just the worst song I’ve ever heard with a swing beat.
Structure is somehow worse. Again, what is going on here? Song structure is terrible. The pop song structure is not the issue here, but this album doesn’t stick to its guns on any of its many compositional ideas. There are these songs with little intro licks then it just stops going where I think it’s going to go based on that intro and does something completely different. This isn’t The Moon by The Microphones, I WISH not enough of a graceful warning into the next part of the song was the only problem here. It just completely abandons whatever ideas it has at the beginning and left turns into something else. The idea in question is something equally as bad, but given the lack of warning, it’s worse. What are these cheap fade outs instead of an ending that could tie the song up in a neat little bow? Show me the end of the song, you coward! The second side, Angelic Rockadelic (*shudders*) has this amp fuzz at the end of half these songs. It just seems like the producers of this record forgot to cut that crap out. Speaking of abandoning ideas, what the hell is this album’s structure? What is its identity? Why do some of these songs allude to transitions into the next song and then the next song does not follow through on that promise? Even worse, what are these skits that somewhat have a story, and yet don’t commit to that fully? It just makes for this clunky mess of an album. There’s a long gap between a skit and different songs that you’ve basically forgotten about all the angel stuff, and then there’s a “Hu-hey, kids, put on Disc 2” at the end of Test 1 to cap off the end of the Angelic Funkadelic section, which, by the way, isn’t “funkadelic” at all, if anything it’s electronic or something. Then there’s the Angelic Rockadelic section, which kind of fits that description but is more funkadelic than the funkadelic section AND it has that stupid jazz song on it! Oh, speaking of the second half, the first song on that half is called Seamless and it is the most ironic title for a song I’ve seen since Swans’ She Loves Us. Hey, Tantacrul, did you ever figure out the opposite of seamless yet? Seamy sounds weird, but it sure would fit an album like this! At every twist and turn, it’s like this fever dream of different ideas and songs, none of which actually pan out or is handled very well. St. Anger had good ideas and then just ripped that away, and it felt like they had a trapdoor down to a pit of alligators that they just dropped me down into again and again. This album is more relaxed in its approach. You think that something almost sounds good, and then you just realize again and again, you’re listening to Corey Feldman’s Angelic 2 The Core and you just calmly return to a baseline misery.
LYRICS
Oh my god, where to even begin with these lyrics or vocals or anything? Corey Feldman…not a good singer, I’m sorry to say. The tone is terrible, the autotune on Lovin Lies doesn’t even know what’s happening, just like the listener. The WeEeEeEe on We Wanted Change is just the icing on the flour, yeast, rotten egg concoction that is certainly not cake of terrible vocals on this record. Wow, these are bad! The monotone vocals on Ascension Millennium, the disgusting sounds of 4 Bid In Love (seriously what is with the 4’s in the titles!), the harmonies on Remember 222 scraping together in the ugliest way I’ve ever heard. The gritty voice that I guess is a Michael Jackson impression is comical at best and gross at worst. But the thing that sends me into a fit of rage the most is the fact that Corey, in the latter half of song after song after song (it’s not all of them, but it is too often not to note), sings off beat! This isn’t some experimental, two tempos at once sort of freeform jazz, this is supposed to be pop music, I assume, so WHY THE HELL IS COREY FELDMAN NOT SINGING ON TIME?! WHAT IS THIS ALBUM?! Oh, and don’t even get me started about the features on this thing. WHO THE HELL IS SB?! I Googled “SB Corey Feldman” multiple times, and all I could find was Test 1. It’s the greatest mystery in music history! Another mystery is why every single person featured on this record finds a way to make me mad. There’s Kurupt’s verse on Lickity Splickity (does Corey know it’s lickity split), Snoop’s verse on Go 4 It, the angels in the first half, Kaya Jones on 4 Bid In Love, the Fred Durst feature in Seamless. No matter what happens, everyone on here is contributing to some of the worst bars and lyrical ideas I have ever heard, period. And let’s zoom in on Fred Durst for a second because he’s swearing in his verse, and it’s censored for some reason, because, I guess Fred fucking Durst is too aggressive for us listeners, but then Corey’s saying, “shit” on Ya Got Me a couple tracks later. I just don’t get it. Oh yes, and why do about half of the tracks in the first half end with them having a laugh in the studio? It’s cute for a track or two, then it becomes groan-worthy, and it shows the lack of discipline throughout the record. There’s so much to unpack with this album, I swear to God.
You know how I asked what the theme/identity of this album is? Well, lyrics don’t really help with that. So, you get to the first 30 seconds or so of Ascension Millennium, the opener, and you get the voice of God to welcome you into the ride of a lifetime, the second song does that too and you’re like “oh ok, this could almost be decent”. Then you get the Charlie’s Angels skits with a horny Corey Feldman telling the angels to do stuff that revolves around making people happy and to “be sexy”. That’s a recurring theme, I guess, but Corey really doesn’t commit to that fully, only with a handful of tracks. Despite Corey shoehorning all the titles of the forthcoming songs in the first half at the beginning skit of the title track, alluding to a more cohesive story, I just can’t find that story thanks to that lack of commitment. It’s just words passing by my head. I already mentioned the “There’s a Disc 2” thing at the end of Test 1, which is the most distraught I’ve ever been going into a second disc of an album, because it comes out of nowhere and the songs before that moment were all terrible. The second half is basically a rock album with zero cohesion, with the voice of God at the very end to basically tell you another piece of grim news…this album loops. I would give you an in-depth lyrical analysis of Angelic 2 The Core, but I couldn’t find most of the lyrics. I use Genius to get some more insight on an album and what the artist was going for (at least what people think the artist was going for), but for the most part I was left with a [lyrics to be added] message, and this was the case even with a little bit of digging. No one seems to want to listen to this album multiple times over to figure out what Corey Feldman is saying for most of this album, just the beginning and a few legendarily bad songs at the end. Even if they were all easy to find, it would still just be words flying by me most of the time. That’s not to say that this record doesn’t have heart to it. Corey Feldman is truly expressing himself and putting his heart on his sleeve, but it’s just overshadowed by…well…everything.
CONCLUSION
God, I still need to do a conclusion, eh? What’s left to say about this album besides the cover art that screams in Papyrus font, “graphic design is my passion”. An album that makes an hour and a half feel like 3 years! If any one of these given songs were on any other album, and I mean ANY album, that song would be the worst track on that album, no question. Sound quality sounds cheap and awful. Mixing doesn’t know what to do with many elements to juggle, nor what to do with fewer. Effects are just kind of there and they make this album more nonsensical than it already is. Every instrument on this record is on a spectrum between lame and terrible. Song structure is undisciplined, and it feels unfinished. Album structure is a mess too thanks to a lack of commitment to its own ideas. It’s a mishmash of genres, none of which pan out all that well. Good God, Corey Feldman’s vocals are really bad. He’s off key, his tone is awful and he’s not even singing in time with the music half the time. Features are also terrible, boasting some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard come out of a rapper or any kind of artist’s mouth. Lyrics are just words if you don’t have good things backing it up. As I said, there’s a lack of a cohesive identity to this album found in lyrics too, all because it doesn’t commit nearly enough to its own ideas. That’s not to say there isn’t any, or Corey Feldman is this evil man who saddled us with some sort of divine musical punishment as retribution for the world’s crimes against him, it’s just the ideas are mostly half-baked, and they fail spectacularly. This album is a massive failure. So massive in fact, that my own mother, who isn’t nearly as involved in the “music nerd” thing as I am, heard about this album. Not because of Corey Feldman’s sick dance moves on The Today Show promoting it, but because this album is so legendarily bad. It is epic and awful in the ways that an album like Swans’ To Be Kind is epic and excellent. It’s the anti-To Be Kind. An album that consistently and epically fails at everything it tries to do, both trying everything and nothing to fix it. It has been lauded as one of the worst albums of the decade and perhaps of all time, and I have to say that I agree. This is one of the worst albums you could possibly make. May it strike fear into every musical artist’s or music listener’s heart for the rest of time.
Because what other rating would you give something like this, I’m giving this one a 0/10.
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