Alaska In Winter
Holiday
Milan Records
7/10
If we took a holiday, just one day out of life… Instead of spending it with Madonna, it would be so nice with indie pop artist, Alaska in Winter. One-man show Brandon Bethancourt releases Holiday with no memory of making it. His official Myspace page tells the story: Bethancourt wakes up after a dance party from the previous weekend that lasted 16 hours straight and finds a finished album on his laptop. However, the party animal does remember synthesizers, lasers and haus musik. Dankeschon for this random collection, otherwise this album would be lost on us all, but then again, it does not begin to explain Bethancourt’s sophomore effort.
First of all, do not be deceived by the folksy start to this album. While it gives off an intimate mood, the bass picks up and the song transforms into an interesting musical piece. It sounds like a song that would fit well into an independent, artsy film trailer. Also, it feels like the song is going at a slow, steady pace- hence the title, “We Are Blind and Riding The Merry-Go-Round.” The movement is subtle but effective, especially with the vocals through the vocoder towards the en. For those of you who don’t know, a vocoder is a machine that is used for synthesizing effects and it often gets mistaken for the auto-tune, a T-Pain favorite. The difference between these two studio devices is that the auto-tune uses a phase vocoder to fix vocal pitch, which is a lot more precise than the original vocoder itself.