Van Syla - "Death of a Star, the"

Wow! There are so many musically deaf people around here... (1/10) A very weak attempt at electronic piano ambient. The tunes are primitive (with a catastrophic climax in the horrendous title track). They could maybe work as a soundtrack for Teletubbies or as background music in a hotel's elevator, but that's all. Then we have orchestration. The artist totally loses his grip when it comes to combining more tracks in one piece (see "The Death of a Star" again). Particular instruments do not form a cohesive whole, but rather fight with each other for supremacy. Pure piano pieces with only subtle synthesizer background are better (see "Passing Passion", the best on this album - I'd give it something like 5/10 rating). And finally, the biggest crime of Van Syla - use of primitive cheap keyboard with terrible plastic sound (or lousy samples on computer). It renders this album almost unlistenable for someone with even traces of musical hearing. There's nothing wrong with plastic sound, where it fits - where the artist deliberately goes for synthetic sound (see the whole 8bit genre, for example). But in such Oldfield-like music that Van Syla tries to record it does not fit at all. All these background effects that accompany piano are supposed to add space and atmosphere to the main piano melody. To achieve this they would have to sound natural. You cannot substitute a plastic bucket for a tubular bell, just because it is hollow. And you cannot substitute $20 Casio keyboard for real instruments, nature sounds and field recordings. It can be done with synthetic sounds, but it is really really difficult. It requires good equipment and high skills. Van Syla lacks at least one of them. Of course, piano on this album is probably also synthetic, but it sounds better (as usual). I don't know the reason - either piano is easier to mimic or keyboard makers have more experience, but they usually more or less succeed even in cheap equipment. The effect is almost never as atrocious as with other instruments or sounds. But maybe I am insane? As you can easily see this album is highly praised by the masses. So, can they all be wrong??? Well, it seems for many people the simple melody is everything they need (and the simpler and more primitive the better). These tunes could be written by a talented graduate of a two-week correspondence harmony course (or - these days - by a good computer program). That's OK with me, even if I don't dig it. Many genres feature primitive melodies (check out eurodance, for example) and may still be fun, if done properly. But festering this particular genre with cheap synthetic sounds is a crime (like it would be with classical or early music). That is something I cannot understand or accept. So, to summarize, if your favorite musical genre is nursery rhyme and you think you wouldn't notice if Mike Oldfield replaced tubular bells with steel barrels on his debut album – Van Syla is waiting for you with plenty of beautiful music. If not – for Mozart's sake, stay away! The album has been released on Jamendo and is available for downloading in mp3 or ogg format.