Hello Meteor

Today was apparently record store day, but i don't really have one of those closer than a half-day road trip, so we'll do something even better. Truth be told, most record day releases are kind of crap, but bandcamp never fails to deliver something insanely awesome that'll never get pressed. Buckle all your g-suit straps (yes even the uncomfortable ones), because we're about to blast off into the sprawlingly massive mythos of Hello Meteor.

If we were in England we could just lump it under Ambient Dub and get on with our lives, but we're not. This is America, so we have to call it some sort of VaporAge NewStalgic ElectroFiction DanceTronica from inside a lucid dream with 18th-Century Samurai, interstellar astrobiology, and Hawaii.

Now, what i'd like to do is click the "buy discography" button, but that isn't an option. I can't even afford to just buy them all individually either, some have bizarrely specific prices like $11.11 or $12.42, while his most recent album is a dollar. I like the weirdness, but i also have a deep, dark, internal despisal of the way modern business increasingly makes it difficult to buy things that are supposedly for sale. Just let me fricking hand you money without punch cards and rewards and discount codes and secret handshakes and waiting in line behind people doing full-on bank transactions at a gas station already.

Where was i? Oh, Hello Meteor. Your actual website just points me right back to all the streaming services to listen for free anyway, so at this point i don't actually feel bad for just going album by album and pressing play while i crochet into the eternal blackness of the evening, while occasionally stopping to write about that experience.

So let's scroll down through the next 28 albums and start with the first, Weather Patterns. Before we start though, i feel like i should point out that look, dude, all the merch you did list is sold out, so presumably you made some amount of money from it, and your community does in fact love your music, and you make every new release a dollar for a large span of time, so you could at least in theory invest more in yourself and have some copies sitting on a shelf that weirdos like me will actually buy from you. Don't take that as too much of an insult, i just don't like the sporadic ebay approach to selling your own art and small merch runs. Then again, i'm nobody with no fan base, so you keep doing you. I'm just honestly describing how my original intent to send you money died a slow and tediously systematic step-by-step death. Thanks, me, now i absolutely hate it. It sounds like the kind of glossy, air-brushed fake, sterile happiness that makes me desperately long for the mundane realness of pulling a giant hair clog out of the sink.

Is any of that fair to Hello Meteor? No, but it's true. I was super intrigued by The Department of Marine Sciences, and i still am, but on the larger scale something just doesn't sit right with me; there's something dishonest, but i can't quite pinpoint it. I don't believe that you believe in it. I don't mean that it's not good, and i don't mean that people shouldn't enjoy it, i mean that i get a feeling that at the end of the day you don't have to care. You've got Nick Warren name dropping you, you're on all sorts of random blogs, but all anybody really says is that it "sounds pretty." Nothing wrong with that, but that's the actual sales pitch: music for people who like things that sound pretty. The graphic design of the concepts comes across as schtick, the music just a shiny rock or a bag of hair scrunchies inside the gift wrap you're really selling.

Again, i'm being pedantic and unfair, but i'm also being honest. I have to actually work to like it in spite of all the completely irrelevant, non-musical things surrounding it that make me instinctively hate it; exactly the same way it got harder and harder to actually find a way to give you money like i originally intended.

So what actually happened here? Well, i was really intrigued by the concept of your latest album and i wanted more of that, but what i got instead was the QVC presentation of how bougie i'm supposed to feel consuming it and now i want to puke.

Worst of all, these are not nice things i've said about some really fascinating and creative hard work you've done. Then again, reading through comments/blurbs about your albums turns up exactly the same questions i've implicitly raised, albeit in a positive (dare i say naive) way, as opposed to my matter-of-fact curmudgeonly party-pooping. Don't hate the player, hate the game seems an appropriate idiom to bring up at this point, but i feel like the game is what you're selling and my pockets don't seem to be emptying themselves at you.

Am i the bad guy here? Yes, i think i am. Buuuuut, i think there's also a fair bit of antagonism built in and it's that feeling of entrapment i don't like. It's like i'm buying mid-level consumer electronics out of the trunk of your new Mercedes. It's not inherently junk, but you're presenting it like found objects from the orient that might as well be. There's a word for that, that word is "sketchy."

Granted, this has not been a review full of high praise for an underappreciated artist, but i think we can all agree that Hello Meteor has proven to be highly intellectually stimulating.

https://hellometeor.bandcamp.com/