Benjamin Pena, also known as Producer Snafu, has put together an exciting chiptune album. In a way, it’s kind of a mess.
It’s got beats all over the place, sometimes within a single track. He jumps from sweet to panicky in the span of just a few seconds. But you know what? I kind of love that.
It’s all at once cutsey 8-bit, dancey dubstep, and soft and sweet. Sometimes it carelessly teeters that edge. I still love it. Heck, there’s even a song that references Adventure Time, and if you’ve been following Kotaku closely you had to have noticed my love for that show. Unfortunately “Oh My Glob” is one of the album’s weaker tracks. It’s got a subtle dubstep tone, which I prefer to the all-out raging, Skrillex-esque tracks, but it just somehow doesn’t enrapture me as strongly as some others.
Take the first track, the album-titled “Bitches Don’t Know Bout My Beeps.” It starts off wary and picks up into a funky, lengthy chiptune beat. It might seem like there are extraneous beats sewn into it near the middle there, but my ears don’t seem to mind.
“So Bad” is somewhat smoother than the crazy “Bitches Don’t Know Bout My Beeps,” and I find the up-and-down rhythm to be incredibly sexy.
The album is riddled with hits and misses, but the hits are strong enough to warrant gemlike quality and my full, all-day attention. So while the album starts out strong with some quirky tracks, it falls off a bit for me here and there in the middle, but picks up traction with tracks like “Pixelhated” and “Game Over” and again towards the end with the sweet “Thanks for the Sandwich” and “November 20th” that sound like something straight out of the Fez soundtrack.
The hits continue with a trippy yet slow “Sigh” to balance out the more intense introduction.
So, yes, it is all over the place. But there’s something charming about this producer’s ability to capture so many different kinds of sounds. One second you’re caught in a head-banging track, and the next you’re zoning out peacefully. For someone with a diverse musical palette like myself, it’s a nice ride throughout (with perhaps a few speed bumps).
Bitches Don’t Know Bout My Beeps [Band Camp via Reddit]
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