NEW ALBUM FROM NORTH BERGEN’S LOVE-STRUCK COSMONAUT
Shake’s music reminds me of Michael Jackson (Thriller + Dangerous era) and Pink Floyd. Before you go running to listen, based off those descriptions, Shake doesn’t straight up sound like either of those pop music titans.
The production’s proclivity toward synths and dark moods is what recalls Floyd, while the sensitivity vs angst, solitude and fusion of various pop music styles is what feels not so much like Michael’s music but like something he would’ve produce for another artist had he ever decided to go Quincy Jones on us.
The latest album, You Can’t Kill Me, is as defiant as the title commands. But in the title is also the clue of mortality and endurance if not survival. Someone in a review wrote, if this is a love album, its only one insofar as love has caused Shake pain. I think there’s plenty of songs about joy and synergy on this record but for me, the true consistent thread, is how loud it feels to feel. This album magnifies feelings, from the desperate and addicted to the spiritual and blissful.
The lyrics are straight forward and still enlist a mystique, Shake’s singing slides in and out of auto-tune so often that I can’t tell the difference anymore. Something about that also reminds me of Floyd. Shake is a new-psychedelic evolution from early Floyd experiments. Experiments that occurred before the rise of Hip-Hop, electronic music, and later still, the Yeezus album and Kid Cudi in general. It’s moon music quite literally as Dani Moon is another name Shake goes by.
You Can’t Kill Me is a loner’s record. Reflected in the absence of features. But the album constantly reaches for connection. To awaken feeling, or to keep it alive, hence the immortality of experience, which cannot be diminished by the quality of what one feels but is sustained by the very fact that one continues to feel.