George Fitzgerald - Child EP

There has been a large influence of ‘90s stylings in modern music, especially in electronica. Most who tend to be leaning this way, are taking these elements and putting them into a pool of other ingredients, combining two separate things into one to create something fresh. It’s a classic way of keeping music interesting, genre blending. However, with George Fitzgerald’s EP, even from the first track, I knew that this wasn't going to be as enjoyable and as developed as that.

The eponymous opener ‘Child’ is a long, tedious mess. Like with most 90s dance, it opens and loops a very plain, irritating beat for far too long, layers other simplistic and uninteresting loops of pathetic and weedy synths and a few samples of that done-to-death style of a young woman singing, being copied and pasted for the entirety of the song, all so it fits into ‘the beat’. The lack of imagination and creativity here is laughably amateurish, and sounds like the simplest song anyone could write on a piece of music software - the kind of Garageband song you put together for fun, dragging and dropping all of the pre-done loops and layering it up to the degree where it appears like ‘a song’, even though you’ve written nothing, played no instrument and sequenced very little but a bit of cheeky organisation in a controlled and pre-written mainframe. Well done.

The second song ‘Hindsight’ is equally as long and equally as tedious and suffers from the same simplistic bullshit the last track did. Just another set of overly stretched out drum and synth loops and samples, done to the beat, left to run too long, that never build to anything interesting, momentous or stimulating. Occasionally something changes, but the only reason you notice is because you’re so eager for something genuinely enjoyable that you’ll accept any variation at all. And this kind of anti-climactic boredom continues for the rest of the EP, that, for four tracks, amazing manages to stretch to twenty-six minutes. Twenty. Six. Minutes.

And it certainly does show. Listening to this is like having an entire night out of repeatedly passing out (due to complete and utter boredom) in the kind of club that would play this crap. Whenever you do wake, nothing noticeable changes and the mind-numbing feeling it leaves you with, riddles your expectations with disappointment, listlessness and depression at the state of music.

This EP is a perfect listen while doing morning yoga, and very little else. Something you can faze out to, something so completely uninteresting that you’ll never genuinely find yourself paying any true attention to it because it’s just that lifeless and shit.

1.4

Eliot Humphreys