{"id":216601,"date":"2021-05-24T01:28:24","date_gmt":"2021-05-24T05:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/25yearslatersite.com\/?p=216601&preview=true&preview_id=216601"},"modified":"2024-01-25T00:00:46","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T05:00:46","slug":"ilan-bluestones-impulse-beautiful-and-awkward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tvobsessive.com\/2021\/05\/24\/ilan-bluestones-impulse-beautiful-and-awkward\/","title":{"rendered":"Ilan Bluestone’s Impulse: Beautiful and Awkward"},"content":{"rendered":"
I had no reason to expect anything other than an amazing new record from “tronce” music legend Ilan Bluestone. Since debuting on the Anjunabeats label in 2012, he’s been an absolute mainstay of the progressive trance world, having given us lots of infectious dance anthems on his own and with collaborators. Bluestone’s first album, Scars<\/em>, finally saw release in 2017 and set the bar pretty high if songs like “Frozen Ground” (feat. Giuseppe De Luca) and the heart-wrenching “Will We Remain?” (feat. Maor Levi and EL Waves) are anything to go by. His sophomore album Impulse<\/em> has all of these previous collaborators and more, boasting 18 brand new cuts from Bluestone and friends and clocking in at 71 minutes—long, to be sure, but there’s nothing wrong with a lot of new music from a good musician, is there?<\/p>\n Well…as it turns out, this album has a fatal flaw that keeps an otherwise good collection of songs from being great. It’s not the production, since Bluestone has shown again and again how good he is at building tension, creating atmosphere, and bending electronic sounds to his will. It’s not the length, since these 18 tracks fly by at a breakneck pace. It’s not Bluestone’s limited range, since he seems to have no limits on the kinds of songs and sounds he wants to make, and it doesn’t lack for collaborators—De Luca, Levi, and Waves all return for their own songs alongside Bluestone newcomers Alex Clare (yes, the Alex Clare who did that one dubstep song for that one Microsoft ad) and Jan Burton (a regular singer on Gabriel & Dresden’s music; check out “You” and “Keep on Holding”).\u00a0Impulse<\/em>‘s biggest problem is one that I just can’t look past: the lyrics are\u00a0absolutely atrocious.<\/em><\/p>\n