EP REVIEW: Brandon Cueto - Countless Times
Nowadays, I hardly cover the electronic-bedroom music scene since I’ve been invested with a different music scene each every few months or so. I completely felt like this would be the appropriate time to talk about it here in this review because this day marks a return of one of the very first local producers I have ever met in my early days of music blogging, Brandon Cueto.
Brandon Cueto is an electronic music producer slash comedian. I met him through his Facebook account and I’ve encountered his very humorous Facebook page that consists of dad jokes and cleverly photoshopped memes of that particular pun. Brandon also creates a great amount of electronica with the future bass tones and many other electronic music elements (that I might be crucified for mislabeling, advanced apologies if I do). For a while, he’s been hibernating from making music and decided to bring back the pieces of his life in the past year. He had just released a comeback EP titled “Countless Times”, a 3-track effort of an extended play that ranges across different subgenres of electronica.
Countless Times EP starts off with the first track “Right Now I’m Alone”, a track that puts subtle parts of emotive pop and lyrics that discuss about telling that someone to stay in a rough relationship. The track has part trap and part dreamy ambient pop in the track. It’s an okay track to be honest, enought to make me curious where this EP will go to next. The second track “Sever” featuring saxophonist Joseph Bisenio, the second track starts to pick up from here. The production behind this track elevates more of Brandon’s skill of making something very engagement arrangement-wise. The swerving synth effect is working really well along with this pitched up trombone (I think it’s a trombone I can’t tell) and the chopped up saxophone adds a nice touch. This is definitely not “dance music” according to Brandon himself but I just can’t help but bop my head into this.
The last but definitely not the least track, “Countless Times”. The title track sounded definitely like post-dubstep wonks. They’re inserted in the middle of the drop, adding this flare to the track. Being one of the most “saddest but hopeful” tracks out of the three, describing it by an audiophile’s perspective, I’m pretty much sure that this track describes letting go. It captures the moment where you decided to go off and leave the toxic stuff behind.
In conclusion, Brandon Cueto’s brand of electronica and emotive pop come together like bread and butter in this project. “Countless Times” is decent and it might be his return to form even though there was minimal to no lyrical hints along the project (which I wish should be utilized more in this project in my humble opinion) but it hits more on the technical side and there’s no spoonfeeding to be found which is a great thing. Personally, it’s not one of his strongest record emotionally, but sonically speaking this is his most impressive one yet.