I like albums with audacious concepts. Often, though, the music itself is boring, the concept simply serving as a crutch. When I first heard the newest offering by Mochipet (Taiwan-born David Wang), I had no idea that it was a concept album — and I liked it. My point being that good concept albums don’t ever live in the shadow of their concepts: the music is simply enriched by an understanding of the artist’s singular intentions. And in this case, they’re quite singular: Chicxulub, as the press release states, “is the soundtrack for an animated novel in which the Dinosaurs make their way through the impact of the comet believed to have destroyed them.”
Chronology is kind of a funny thing. If I had read that ridiculous description before my maiden voyage with the album, the music would definitely have disappointed me. The bombastic concept would have completely drowned out the music, I’m sure. But because I read it after listening to the album, everything instead clicked into place, and all of the elements of the music that I liked made more sense, giving the album a level of narrative depth of which I was previously unaware, appreciative as I was of the record’s epic synth textures. Suddenly the album’s scope, its plodding glitch-hop and huge synths, became panoramic.
