MEGA by Blank Banshee

Known as the pioneer of the mix of vaporwave and electronic dance music, Blank Banshee became popular for bringing vaporwave to a casual audience. His first album Blank Banshee 0 is typically known as one of the classical vaporwave albums.

On Oct. 10, Blank Banshee released his third album MEGA after a three year wait.

The album consists of 15 songs, and being consistent with his last two albums, the first song is a sort of short and slow introduction to the album. However, this is followed up by “My Machine”. “My Machine” is a song that takes inspiration from hard vapour and does not really fit well with the rest of the album.

The rest of the album is filled with slow trap songs that have a heavy aesthetic such as “Frozen Flame”, “Gunshots” and “Ecco Chamber”.

Overall the album is good at telling the story of each song, but the songs themselves do not fit well together. Songs like “XENOS” and “My Machine” that have fast-paced and heavy rhythms mixed with songs like “Megaflora” and “Frozen Flame” that are mostly harmonic and melodic content.

In summary, the album is good, just not great. If I had to give it a rating it would be a solid 8 out of 10.

Revolution Radio by Green Day

Green Day is one of those bands that everyone seems to have heard of, but no one seems to have the exact same opinion about them, but being a premier punk rock band for over 20 years can lead to the decline in quality. Some would argue that this was exactly what happened to Green Day.

Four years after their last album releases, Green Day has put out Revolution Radio. With a shorter length of 12 songs this album opens up with the intro track “Somewhere Now”. This song gives a good idea of what the rest of the album will be, which is cringey lyrics, whiny ballads, and horrible mixing.

The mixing in this album was a nightmare. The tracks would begin so quietly that I had to turn up the volume only to be blasted 30 seconds later by the chorus which was at 2 times the volume of the first verse. The song “Outlaws” is a good example of this very mistake, as well as the other things I had mentioned earlier.

This album lyrically is lacking for anyone who is over the age of 13 or is not going through a scene or emo phase. That being said there are some very good hooks in this album.

While I mentioned the flaws of the song “Outlaws” before, the thing this song does well is present a good vocal hook for the chorus. However, most of the songs on this album fail to do that and just end up being a cringeworthy ballad with roaring guitars over it.

The biggest problem this album has is being unoriginal. Nothing has changed from previous Green Day records and it feels like a very back to basics formula for the album as a whole. The mixing is problematic and compromised the album completely.

Overall if you are not a fan of modern pop punk, you will not like this album. If I had to give it a rating it would be a 5 out of 10.

Final Words

While I did use a numerical value to give a good idea of how these albums were, I am a firm believer that art cannot be truly quantified. All of the things I said were a simple matter of opinion, an opinion which you are allowed to agree or disagree with.

If you are wondering what makes me qualified to determine whether these albums were truly good enough, I have been playing musical instruments for eight years now and I have been a music producer and audio engineer for four years now. However, the reality of the situation is anyone with an opinion can write a review because it is a matter of opinion.

I chose these two albums because one was made by a mostly unknown artist and the other was made by a well known band. The great contrast in the albums’ creations is something that I wanted to present to the reader. This is not to be interpreted as me thinking that mainstream music is bad and underground music is perfect, that was just the case with these two albums in comparison.