Album Review: Kid Koala Makes “Music To Draw To: Satellite”
Kid Koala is releasing a new record called Music To Draw To: Satellite. His third album features the amazingly talented, Icelandic songstress Emilíana Terrine. Created during the gelid Montreal winter, its eighteen movements tell a tale of discovery and loss through the lens of lovers separated by an early, one-way mission to Mars. The album is a first for Kid Koala in terms of playing all instruments, working with a vocalist, and using lyrical poetry for a particular theme. Yet, it is a worthy, first venture for Koala as a chance for artistic growth and an opportunity to further show the industry his collaborative creativity.
As an album Music To Draw To: Satellite works on multiple levels. It sparks a quiet, spacey vibe that makes you feel like you are on that rocket-ship to Mars looking through a small window at the planets your passing. It, definitely, has an observant feel by using brights synths that come off like stars being sparkled from your hands. The twinkled instrumentals are used smoothly to give the feel of slight melancholy this doomed love story wishes to garner. After all, this record is about lovers separated by a universe, to which Emiliana Torrini’s singular and simple voice makes seem common. It is as if everyone has experienced a lover leaving them for another planet. This idea of universal separation feeling intimate to listeners’ experiences is built through the magical union between Kid Koala’s arrangements and Emiliana Torrini’s voice.
Separation can feel like a universe has wedged itself between your heart and the one it has grown fond for. What is magnificent and refreshing about Music To Draw To: Satellite’s theme is that it is not about love breaking as much as separating. Sometimes, relationships do not end because of sadness or miscommunication as much as different fates aligning. Hence, the albums’ ability to make something so personal feel so planetary will move listeners because it feels like a starry goodbye, in which, you are not leaving because of the bad. You are just leaving for another good. Thus, in sonics, the album plays somberly though softness. Usually, when you think of space you think of aliens, lasers, and a certain rapidity that can make the galaxy seem like a huge place you zoom through. Yet, for Kid Koala and Emiliana Torrinni, the galaxy, like life, is not something you race through as much as you go through, It is in that notion that Torrinni’s voice comes off like a “mental slow-down”. It is as if her gentle vocals are hand saying, “Stop! Where are you going and why?.” Yet, she is not asking these questions to challenge but to discover. When love grows apart due to circumstance rather than lack of care, you could see your relationship like the Heavens; trying to figure out how the same stars that shone so bright have become so far from you.
Kid Koala’s Music To Draw To: Satellite is a brilliant album to play when you want to feel inspired to create. It is subtle and motivating in its instrumentals, which will give listeners a “pick-me-up” that is not a bombardment of energy but rather an easy kick of adrenaline. In an odd way, the recorddoes make you want to draw your life and see how the lines of its story cross. Like a satellite, it does pick up certain nuanced emotions that other records have not because of its use of lyrical poetry, and it being an album of so many firsts for Kid Koala. While his music is usually loud, fun, and deliciously rambunctious, this record felt like a new aim for him. Although planned, Music To Draw To: Satellite seems effortless and one where it was about Kid Koala’s personal self-discovery, which explains the stardust ambiance it builds. If humanity truly is stardust than Kid Koala has created 72 minutes of music that shows us how beautiful we are in being so cosmic. For More information On Kid Koala and To Buy Music To Draw To: Satellite Click Here.
