Quadeca is no stranger to the bizarre and unorthodox. Since his days of FIFA videos and diss tracks, he’s matured into his own style of music, broadly characterized by wistful guitars, brooding synthesizers and layers upon layers of production that bring together elements of multiple genres to create beautiful hodgepodges throughout every album. On his latest album “Life 1,” he takes his production to a new level, creating musical vignettes in each song that fully focus on transporting the listener to his fantastical new territory.
Years of development refined Quadeca, or Benjamin Lasky, into an artist with ambitious projects. Just over a year ago, he released “Vanisher, Horizon Scraper” to widespread critical acclaim. This was an album that represented enormously ambitious growth with its intricately layered vocals and fully-realized concept about a sailor lost at sea. He released a full album movie to go with it, and while I appreciated the album’s ambition and its execution, I felt as though most songs sounded too similar to one another, with a focus on high production value at the expense of good songwriting. In “Life 1,” however, Lasky focuses more on the production process to create songs that sound like collages tied together by his voice.
Quadeca emphasizes the album’s disjointed feeling throughout the listening experience, starting with the album cover. It features an unpleasant gray gradient and a photo of an annotated piece of sheet music over a tawny background. The simplicity disguises many concepts on “Life 1,” but I think that most of all, Quadeca is trying to express his desire to create music his way.
At his core, Quadeca focuses on the visuals. He’s a YouTuber, and in the past has made a bunch of cinematic music videos like he did for “Vanisher.” I’m unsure whether he’ll release a full movie like he did with “Vanisher” because the videos don’t seem as cohesive, but he has already published five videos, which make up more than a third of the album.
Take “It goes like this” as an example. He includes a (seemingly) random horse neigh and a saxophone riff into an ordinary song before ascending into a mix of beautiful piano arpeggios for the song’s climax. On “Baby Steps,” he inserts a sound effect of an explosion immediately after the lyric “Let’s pull up to the airport to practice a joke ’bout a bomb.” “The Gambler” is a whole song satirizing the character of a prediction market addict that makes use of cash register sounds. I don’t want to say that he’s adding random sounds for the sake of it, since it works nearly every time. I love the disjointed production here; Quadeca tries to create a new world in every song, which makes every track unique in its own way.
At the same time, I don’t think that he fully commits to creating these soundscapes. While he clearly explores plenty of new ideas, “Life 1” still comes from the same foundation as his previous releases, and his songwriting hasn’t become varied enough. His lyrics still produce moments of brilliance, like his contemplations of suicide on “Illusion of choice,” but it’s always awkward to hear how he sings the word “shawty.”
All in all, “Life 1” displays excellent growth and maturity from Quadeca. He’s clearly a talented producer and songwriter, and every song on “Life 1” feels like a sketch of some mood or place that he produces with little trouble. While still tagged to the same flaws of repetitive lyrical styles and a lack of anything incredibly interesting, Quadeca’s “Life 1” stands as a notable development on an already impressive career.
