I started REALLY getting into 80s music around the time of the pandemic. If we were talking Hall & Oates, pre-2020 I would have said Abandoned Luncheonette (1973) was my desert island selection; since that weird time of isolation I was only about Ooh Yeah! (1988). During this time I was using almost all my waking hours to study music production and mixing online and basically, it seemed to me like the most authentic music I could record in my situation and at my technical level was synthesizer-based music, with retro electronic drum sounds and big reverbs and vocal effects to disguise what I feared would be amateurish recording and mixes. These instrument and effects all lived in my production software, as did I for most of this time.

I also became obsessed with the [dying] trends of synthwave and vaporwave, two different takes on 80s musical redux, mostly made by bedroom producers. These styles of music production emphasize and exaggerate different respective musical touchstones of 80s popular music: synthwave mostly being an edgy, pulsing instrumental image of driving in a neon night city, and vaporwave being a reverberant pastiche of RnB-inflected pop, as you would have heard in a mall.

(I really honed in on vaporwave in as EM/FM, on ‘Close Enough’.)

All that to say, these retrowave musics are usually exaggerations of these past tropes. What I love most about this album is that it’s almost more vaporwave than vaporwave. It’s full of sparkling keyboards (master arranger and GOAT sparkly-keyboardist Dave Grusin produced and played on this record – another reason to love it) funky, trebly basslines (courtesy of Marcus Miller) and a range of jazzy poppy tunes that would be yacht rock if they were produced differently.

“I’m In Love Again” is an iconic intro to the album. The arrangement is perfect, the chorus is super-catchy, there’s great jazzy chords pulling the ear along, a great solo section. But it’s really where it’s lacking that makes me love it: something in the mix or master stage has the record feeling like it’s almost amateurish or done on a budget, which is generally what vaporwave is designed to sound like. The vocals are less than perfect. I love it.

The writing credits bounce between the two singers and several other contributors. There’s precious little about this record on the internet and only a little on the two artists. Amanda Homi seems to have continued in an alternative sort of world music career. Her contribution “You Got Me Fallin'” hits me in all the spots, avoiding cheese with its purity and tasteful synth textures.

Even the weaker songs I find enjoyable for the depth of their arrangement details, credit to Grusin’s taste for harmony and groove. Lee Ritenour, David Sanborn and Harvey Mason Sr. also bring the goods – even Toots Thielemans makes an appearance, on ‘Some Hearts’. Cool key change in this one too.