One of my biggest faults as a music fan was accepting quantity over quality in my younger years. One such excess was purchasing the entirety of Business Casual’s catalog for, if I remember correctly, around $5 in 2016.
At the time it was *only* a few hundred releases, and of the hundred or so Vaporwave and Future Funk albums that I did actually get around to listening to, the ones that stuck with me were more than enough for a lifetime.
I’ve learned to let go, and when I have time I cull my digital music library. This is owned, not streamed. So I don’t mean ‘unliking’ songs, I mean deleting files ~ooOOoo scary!~
That’s how a decade after its release, and a decade after I purchased it, I finally listened to Tonight by Color Television.
Damn.
The kicks come fast and hit hard. All thriller no filler. 4 tracks of wormy bass synths and punchy kick + snare combos drenched in that sleazy 80s plastic commercial pop melodrama.
It splits the difference of Macintosh Plus and Daft Punk, with a few extra BPMs lying around.
Get too drunk on camp and it soon turns to kitsch. Which is why Vaporwave and its subgenres usually hit the hardest when sticking close to its experimental and transgressive roots.
Despite this record aging better than many of its contemporaries, had this EP came out right now I probably wouldn’t even click on it. But here we are now, and now I can appreciate Tonight for what it was at the time- a clever and, albeit overlooked, captivating record.
Treat yourself to 11 minutes of Future Funk fun and stream the album on Bandcamp.
For fans of: Daft Punk, Macintosh Plush, Yung Bae
Like Color Television? Give these a listen: Fracture, Nu Shooz, Acetantina
The Resident Sound 