REVIEW: Pregnant’s “Life Hard: I Try”
Pregnant‘s bio for his Life Hard: I Try (Mush) album says the music was “written and recorded during a time of impending fatherhood and the start of his family”, which almost sounds like he was the one giving birth. Of course this cannot be true, as Daniel Trudeau is not Billy Crystal from the movie Rabbit Test, but what you do hear is music of discovery, wonderment, and inner beauty meant to be a mirror of the world viewed by someone about to go through some changes. The album is a mixture of vocalized treasures and instrumental ditties, and they could be anything from folk tales made by cooler-than-folk people or electronic sounds without Moby‘s assumed egos. It sounds homemade and highly concentrated like a can of soup, but within this can is a nice assortment of ingredients that might make you say “if I created electronic soundscapes, this is what I’d like for my mind to sound like while open.” It’s quirky at times, there are moments where you wonder if the sound of amplified water drips mixing up with angelic harps should make people create figure 8′s with their hips.
By calling himself Pregnant, does Trudeau want to create music that sounds like “creation in progress”? If so, I love what he’s able to do in his mental womb and it comes off as a place that you never want to leave. Life Hard: I Try is something worth listening to from start to finish, a perfect example of not only solid sound organization, but how to do it in long play form.
(Life Hard : I Try will be released on September 6th. You can preview some of the songs by clicking the Bandcamp player below.)
What do you think?