In a day and age where it’s hard to make a living through writing and or performing music it’s good to see people just doing it to express themselves.

Cloudkicker means a lot to me. I’ve always been exploring music actively and this blog is a huge reason for that. Now one of the oddest individuals I’ve seen since this journey has started has been the success and development of cloudkicker. I have even gotten the chance to catch cloudkicker live with intronaut as the backing band, there is a live album from the tour also. Now cloudkicker is someone who really seems to not care about fame from a third person point of view. He could post play-through videos and get a ton of views of his stuff. He could write the same album over and over again but he doesn’t. He even strives to release weird shit that would never get published by a label such as “Hello” which is a relaxing 10 min long abstract song and “Loop” which is just a collection of loops.

Now this latest album seems like the most passive release from him ever since coming out, no where is there any forced attempt at inventing something new or bold, here we simply have feel-good music which is something that I’m glad to hear from someone who has such a large discography. Trying to continuously one up your previous material is a endless road that will get you no where. This is the kind of album you leave in the background of your life but that you can dive into at any moment actively and still be fulfilled.

Here are words from Ben Sharp himself on the release:

“Woum is a nice culmination of the past 10 years of making music on my own, and I feel like it reconnected me to the thing that got me into this in the first place: That making music is really fun because you can do whatever you want.”

It’s an interesting step from his last release, “Little Histories” which is also quite short, but I seem to enjoy the latest one more that it. Structure is typical cloudkicker in the sense that the songs are based around looped sections but what feels different is that there is nothing in your face about the songs. No huge guitar riffs, no pounding drums, no gnarly bass. It’s just a ride that we’ve been allowed to take on.