Voicecoil - Awakened

After listening to this album thoroughly, it's easy to see why there's been some hype behind the talent that is Voicecoil. With sharp suits to accent the sharp man behind the music as he makes clubs pulse with his presence as he takes over, Mark Sousa has crafted a loving album that the label has described as having "'Club' written all over it." And twelve tracks of lovely club worthy tracks are handed out in style to anyone who's willing to give it a listen.

With Your Tomorrow hitting off the album, we get a very delicious dance track that fits well within the futurepop genre altogether. Sousa's voice flows well enough with the beat, and it was only from here that the album could get better.

Above & Beyond allows for another alluring beat to throttle your brain, but it also shows the voice changing just a slight bit here and there. With this effort, there's not this stagnant feel to each song, and it's often a problem for me whenever I go to listen to futurepop albums; there's hardly ever a pitch difference in tone. However, this man is seeing through that and making me want to listen to more and more as time goes on.

Awakened brings out another lovely set to get through, the vocals once more able to sooth me through and through, the beat making me sway back and forth. Clear was more jumpy, more fast paced and catchy, and I very much appreciated the synth work during the chorus.

The next few songs were splendid, but sort of sounded similar to one another. Attentuate inputted some decent, robot like vocals, and I really liked the piano touch that came later in the song. It was splendid, and gave the sound a new kick to go off of.

We Degrade was a real refresher, putting out a slower beat, more somber and affectionate vocals, and more graceful piano work. I was able to easily stop everything I was doing and just slowly die down, sit back, close my eyes, and enjoy every single note that struck out from this song. The final song did it's justice, and then two remixes were brought out from it.

Level 2.0 hit in with a remix for Vision and brought a new life to it with choral effects and a bit more of a trance-like element to it. The digital effect added as a back drop to the voice was also a nice little touch. Good remix, and well done. Starbass also provided a remix of the same song, adding in a few wobbles here and there, a bit more bass, and the drum and bass was cranked up. Both remixes were able to match the quality that the original had, so cheers to both artists for that.

And, in terms of production, Voicecoil came out clear and well polished. The sound is awesome, the music comes dance worthy and well worth a listen, and the vocals are changing alongside the tones of the songs. All-in-all, the package is great. The one area where I think the artist could improve would just be to add more variation to his songs; some sounded a bit much like one another, but give a little tweaking and a bit more cherishing, and I think this artist will accelerate to be a top notch producer. However, given how little I cared about what could be improved as to actually enjoying what my ears enjoyed, I'd say this was a damn fine album. Check it out. It's worth it. Sep 08 2014