Review: Thundercat's Apocalypse
“day-glo yellow to Krylon-haze orange to highway-flare pink”
SOUND WORDS: A MUSIC REVIEW SEGMENT
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Mankind has an answer for every end of the world scenario: logical fallacies curb the robot uprising, fear of total annihilation keeps us from nuking each other, the zealous orgasmic-shotgun-to-the-head-glee we're sure to feel in a world overrun by zombies.
So what of the far more plausible eco-apocalypses? Where we burn chemical holes into the sky, melt the ice caps, and flood every great coastal city from New York to San Francisco to Miami.
Listen -- not even the end of the world can stop the party that is Future Miami, now sheltered from the sea above by giant sub-aquatic domes.
As the sky melts over the ocean above, day-glo yellow to Krylon-haze orange to highway-flare pink, people pack the dance clubs that open up to the dome's ceiling. Where lush carpets of orchidaceae and nepenthes and kalanchoe tangle in vines crawling up club entrances, and fish dart and sparkle, caught between the rippling waves of ocean bass above and the beams of disco swirled light below.
Thick hydro-air clings to skin like sweat silk. Dancers rise and fall in pace with the sea levels above. Manatees float lazily at peace in a world free of speedboats. The sex-funk-groove builds within the pressurized dome bubble until cracks appear along the top. The first few drops of water rain in like a keyboard flourish of wet stars. Light and sound drowning each other in air.
Time itself slows as the sea water offers up the dancers a final heaven. The last bits of oxygen burn in the brain, and the world goes all whirlpool: white light eating the toxic color from every last unnaturally lit plant. Prayers floating to the surface of our lips in one last hallelujah chorus to the end of the world as it should be. Suspended in the infinite tropical aqua-space.
This is the same apocalypse you can hear in Thundercat's Apocalypse, which is to say, less soul-crushing terror in the face of the future, and more soul-stirring rapture in its present.
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