MACHINE - F.O.O.L

After building a solid reputation as a foundational member of the Monstercat roster, with over a decade of experience in the electronic game and a slew of fantastic EPs, F.O.O.L (standing for Fuck Our Ordinary Lives) finally steps up and delivers his debut, full-length album. Boy do I wish this was up to the standard of his EPs.

Well, "MACHINE" isn't bad by any means. It's arguably F.O.O.L in full production flow, hosting some of his strongest tracks to date across some of his strongest genres: dark, malevolent synthwave; rolling, pulsating midtempo; deep, consistent electro house — all executed to a tee. This is F.O.O.L putting his most coveted production skills across these genres to good use, crafting the futuristic atmospheres he's always been well-respected for amidst a haystack of strong collaborators, including the likes of PYLOT, Code: Pandorum (a.k.a INHUMAN) and Extra Terra. But the uncanny mechanical skills of F.O.O.L don't stop there, no, he takes the liberty to branch out into genres we've never really seen him expand upon before — progressive trance, peak time techno, brostep, and a couple of chillsynth tunes. Collaborators help here, too, it seems, with hayve supplementing "Valhalla" for a drum n bass roller of a track, and even THIRST pitching in with their drift phonk style for a phonk-midtempo fusion one. The diversity of "MACHINE" is indelible, and I love to see F.O.O.L coming into his own and showing us he's not just another cyberpunk robot artist, he can shift into other genres too — but he's still damn good at doing his cyberpunk robot thing. Where, then, is my problem with this project? It's that F.O.O.L has done all the hard work to set him up for one of the greatest albums of the year, but he doesn't manage to fully capitalize on album structure. Where "MACHINE" could have been a profound, dark cyberpunk journey through the inner workings of the F.O.O.L alias, or an unsettlingly mechanical atmospheric masterpiece, it settles for a vague toying with a bunch of cool tracks without much rhyme or reason. This is where the diversity begins to hurt: F.O.O.L strays a little too far from the album's established moods at crucial points during its runtime, particularly in the second half with the influx of chiller and more reflective tracks, and it really does shatter the cohesive experience of the project, to the point where it ends up being a little unengaging.

Again, to reiterate, "MACHINE" isn't a bad album, just underwhelming for F.O.O.L's standards. Judging by his vast catalogue of EPs, he definitely does have the ability to hold a consistent atmosphere for a prolonged amount of time, and he is indeed a masterful producer, but I can't shake the feeling that "MACHINE" will simply not be his magnum opus — no, in my eyes, this is one of his weaker projects holistically. Though I will say, some of these tracks are very, very good.