Waiting For Something To Happen

William Brittelle “Vivid Culture”

“Vivid Culture” starts off with a strange bait and switch. For the first 30 seconds, you might think you’re entering something like an Andrew W.K. album, with some guy shouting about a “vivid culture,” setting you up for something huge and energetic that never comes along. Instead, you get this melancholy orchestral ballad that veers off into prog territory. William Brittelle’s new album runs through different permutations on this oddball brand of soft rock, but this track may be the most compelling, or at least the one that most fully expresses the overall work’s bleak melodrama. The first half of the piece following the intro establishes its protagonist as a lost, lonely, utterly bored man barely getting through life without inspiration. As the song becomes more psychedelic and grandiose, the singer gets drowned out by the music even as he raises he voice, swallowed up by this bigger, louder thing outside of him, making him tiny and irrelevant. It’s a simple metaphor and it’s been done before, but I think it works very well here, particularly in the way the shift in scale is gradual like a camera slowly pulling away from a close-up into a widescreen panorama.

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