Exposed – Inside the cube

1 review for Exposed – Inside the cube

1. 

   Glenn Folkvord – 2022-11-22

   Exposed‘s album Inside the Cube, an 11-track 74-minute album which offers classic melodic spaceotronica. Most of the tracks are based on rolling arpeggios and sequencers that support melodic themes, space chords and spacey drums. Some tracks remind me of old mp3.com artists such as Fin or Mike Andrews (who, in their turn, were influenced by Jarre and Vangelis), and some tracks are somewhat in the direction of Laserdance, with simple sequencers running behind melodic themes. Occasionally the sequencers take a Berlin School approach. The general sound palette is relatively limited in my ears, as the sound is a little thin and a little low in the bass regions, reminding me sometimes of Syntech, and even old Amiga tracker songs. At the same time, the sound is also clear, clean, neatly mixed and not too crowded.

   Halfway through the album, I have already seen a pattern, and that is that low to mid-tempo tracks work better than uptempo tracks in terms of melodiesand compositional structures. The bouncy and juicy The Cube is an example of the former, and it is followed by the almost Berlin School-sounding (andthus faster) Nexos, where the song structure is weaker.
   The same is the case for the next song, the speedy Altair-Gamma, which has many nice moments, but ultimately the song itself is less interesting than the sum of it’s moments. This is the case with several tracks.
   One exception to this rule is the final track, Spacenight, which has a nice trancey rhythm (and better bass levels) but then again, it’s a remix made by Moonbooter.
   The album is at it’s best when it goes into mid-tempo bubbly, bouncy territory with tracks such as Circle and Orbital Running, of which the latter is the strongest track on the album. These types of tracks display finer composition skills and have better melodies, and make up about half the album. The album as a hole would thus have benefited from fewer tracks. Still, there are enough good tracks to justify the album from a musical perspective. Artistically, I feel the album is lacking some depth or concept or personality.
   Titles such as Stargazer, The Dark Sun and Mothership suggest some kind of outer space or science fiction link, but this is not communicated well enough in the music itself for me to connect” intimately to the music.

   Inside the Cube is a very electronic sounding album without any guitars