Score: 5/10
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The older you get, the more adroit you get at noticing these things (whether there’s any point to noticing them being of course debatable): see, I see this Chrim dude on Facebook advertising a “video,” so I know that there is some self-consciousness involving the music itself, barring it actually being a video on making french onion chicken, or something.
Sure enough, Chrim is quite zany! He dished out album opener “Grandiose Self,” a sort of little ambient-pop think piece snapshot of humanity in his current times, discussing themes of honesty and forthrightness, then potentiating the concept of “going backwards” by associating it with “getting younger.” “Grandiose Self” starts out quite excitingly, with some hearty and grainy, percussive, low-pitched synths flanking off Chrim’s thought bookends, before what is in my opinion an entirely unfortunate repetition of the song’s main theme, which is about honesty keeping you younger. And this is something I’ve noticed as pretty common among otherwise critically acclaimed music of the last years, sort of like that Vince Staples song where he keeps going “I ain’t never ran from nothin’ but the police”. It’s like, I heard you the first time, there, chieftain. There is really no reason to repeat the same line umpteen times within a song, at least that I can think of off the top of my head.
Side a settles in to the point of being generally listenable if certainly juvenile (these really are like songs for babies, or maybe little kids who go and play at Discovery Zone, and as far as I can gather upon initial listen Chrim is not serviceable let alone proficient on any instruments), so it comes as almost like a salvation when track six “Gwendela and Lynn” gallops in leaving its cohorts in its dust. The album’s disco influence pronounces itself strongly here, which will be much welcome following all the pointless hippie pop we’ve heard heretofore. The nature of the subject matter remains pretty ambiguous all throughout this track, as in why the artist would choose to write a cathartic, apparently frustrated or mournful song about TWO women (maybe the love life standards of millennials are elevated from my own), but still, placed next to say like Spoon’s Hot Thoughts, it’s a little less claustrophobic and lover-boy, preferring a sort of vaguely reckless bravado to season its dance-pop.
Chrim is a young electro song writer who shows some promise but is now in grave lack of real life experience to pepper his voice with some calamity and urgency, as well as a more sophisticated instrumentation to grant the music some professionalism.