As I get older, I question the appeal of the raw aesthetic more and more. The appeal of the aesthetic seems to be self-serving, as any consideration if it fits the work at hand seems to be completely thrown out of the window. Labels like Grime Stone Records served us with raw skate punk, raw dungeon synth and other absurd and unfitting ideas. Only so much humor can be derived from the juxtaposition and we have reached the point where it is clever quite a while ago. Also, I am not always sure how much of it is irony and how I am supposed to take all of it. Goblin Priest is a raw chiptune artist, who “enhances” his relatively pedestrian chiptunes with said raw aesthetic. Simple melodies get bitcrushed and seem more and more broken as the album goes on.
A big part of the appeal of chiptune is nostalgia, but I cannot say that my retro consoles ever sounded like this. Beyond the raw, bitcrushed aesthetic, Goblin Priest doesn’t really serve up anything that reminds us of dungeons or black metal at all. The heavy bass lines are often more reminiscent of broish electronic music styles and his decision to imbue the bass with the most volume a lot of the time pushes the bleeps and bloops that serve as melodies to the back. Most of the tracks are below two minutes, which I am thankful for as there is very little to enjoy about the material as is, considering how generic Goblin Priest‘s sense of melody is. The longer his “Ultrazone” trilogy keeps playing, the more I wonder what the purpose of it is. The breakdown of the material seems to accelerate and the bitcrushed distortion pushes more and more of what I could actually enjoy to the back. Maybe this is supposed to be a symbol for the breakdown of the artist and the end of an artistic project – Cryptic Monochrome Maze Crawl was supposedly meant to be the project’s last album at some point, even if the artist has since released another ep. Or maybe the artist just makes bad decisions. Either way, this isn’t for me.
