Record Review: Briston Maroney is Uniquely Himself
Briston Maroney is a down to Earth artist. He makes a lot of great music, but through all of it, his inner voice shines through, communicating his complex emotions in a genuine way that doesn’t feel forced. Buying his albums on vinyl has only enhanced my experience. I love records because when you buy a physical album, it encourages you to look deeper into the music you experience, which allows you to better feel the music. Record collecting has exploded back into pop culture recently, causing more and more people to take up the hobby every day. The surge has crossed the billion-dollar mark this year for the first time in three and a half decades. Records are in big box stores like Target and Walmart now! The comeback started in 2007, just three years after I was born, so I can’t say I was into it before it was cool, but I can say that it is very, very cool. I got into the hobby in 2020, during the dark ages when no one could leave their house.
It was a great time to delve into vinyl because I had a lot of time on my hands to tweak my record system and search for the perfect purchases online. During that time, as I began to listen to albums and singles on my system, I started giving more thought to them and feeling the lyrics more. I started rating them, not only criticizing the music but the product itself. I would determine if the record was a good pressing or if it sounded fuzzy and warped. So, now I’m here. I have an outlet with the Five Star Journal, and I have a lot of opinions on the records I own.
My favorite records I own are often the ones that I buy and barely know the tracklist of. Often I’ve only heard one song from them, but then the rest end up being really good. These hidden gems, the ones that are unexpectedly good, are why I love record collecting. Listening to a good song for the first time sounds a lot better when you pay for it and drop the needle beforehand. An artist that I found recently surprised me like this, who you now can guess is Briston Maroney.
I bought his first two EPs, Carnival and Indiana. Carnival is his first and better-known piece of work. It includes his most popular song, Freakin’ Out On the Interstate. I would refer to him as alternative rock, but he doesn’t always sound exactly like rock. If you haven’t heard anything from Maroney, I recommend starting with Freakin’ Out On The Interstate because that’s how I found him, and it's how most find him. It's a unique-sounding song, talking about love, a breakup, and the intense emotions that come along with that. In my opinion, this song sounds so unique, and I love it. Carnival has a fairly unique sound on a couple of the songs because when I thought the music would get quieter, it got louder. When I expected the music to do the same old guitar notes I hear in radio songs, it would go in a different route (Sorry, I don’t know technical music terms, haha) which is showcased greatly in Freakin’ Out, and I would recommend a listen. The EP earned an overall sixty percent, which isn’t great, but I would like to stress again that this is his first official EP with a label. A couple of the songs I rated as just okay upon my initial rating, specifically Hard To Tell and Rose, which dramatically affect the score of an album when there are only five songs.
That’s actually part of the reason I think his second EP, Indiana, is the better of the two EPs, despite having a smaller tracklist. It only has four songs, but I feel like Maroney improved on his sound with this one and honed in more on who he wants to be in the music industry. Indiana is about his adjustments through a unique time, as he moved from state to state, and he talks about the ups and downs of that. The stand-out song from this EP is Small Talk, which like the overall work itself, is a great song because it has a funky flow, similar to Freakin’ Out On The Interstate. It's another one of his most popular songs for good reason. The tracklist of this EP only has one “just okay” song, which is St. Augustine. This record earned a 75 percent on my initial rating, a big improvement from Carnival. Indiana is available on bubblegum pink vinyl on Maroney’s website. Sorry to any CD collectors out there, but the only physical copies of these albums on his website are records. But luckily for me, I’m into the right hobby at the right time. I’d say, despite having fewer songs than a regular album, Carnival and especially Indiana, are very worth it. The price is cut down because they’re half an album. They’re only $12.99 per record, which is a great price for a record right now. The average price for a mainstream single LP (One record) album is around 20-25 dollars.
The records themselves are printed strangely, where the cover to both is upright, but the back is printed sideways. Not only that but the name of the album on the spine is printed the opposite way than every other album in my collection. This could be a stylistic choice, but I doubt it. I researched online, and they were pressed at the same time and released within the same couple of months by the same manufacturer. I think it’s simply a lack of care by the manufacturer, but I could be wrong. Other than that, they sound great, and I’ve noticed no problems with the audio. So if you only care about the album and not really the presentation on the outside, this is still for you.
Briston Maroney is a unique artist because he comes off as such a genuinely nice person in interviews, documentaries, and clips of him. He put a lot of effort into coming off as genuinely himself in his debut album, Sunflower, which I also bought the record of. The record itself is a rich-looking orange color and looks enchanting on my turntable.
As a record review, I have to state the cons of buying this album. The most significant irritant about this purchase was a mistake with printing lyrics. The album has a lyric page that displays the lyrics to every song.
The lyric page alone is usually a big pro to buying an album (if it includes one), but they messed up the lyrics here. I don’t mean a couple of typos or one song, but every song had the lyrics wrong throughout. I think the record company used some sort of auto-caption AI to fill out the lyrics, which is the worst thing you can do because the definition of singing is saying stuff in a strange way that isn’t normal and, therefore, couldn’t be interpreted by an AI correctly. If this wasn’t a robot filling out these lyrics, the worker who did this job should be fired. A Google voice search could better understand the lyrics than whoever or whatever filled them out on the lyric page. As a perfectionist with my record collection, this makes me want to use the record to decapitate myself.
That’s the big problem with records making a resurgence lately. It’s almost like a fad. The fact that it's so popular right now makes all businesses want a piece of that pie, so everyone with the means to do so is churning out records right now, which makes it very hit-and-miss whether a buyer gets quality or crap. Just because a record was made doesn’t mean it was made right. Anyway, rant over, a lot of albums don’t even have lyric sheets, and if they do, it is most often printed on the inner record sleeve. But in Sunflower’s case, it's a completely separate sheet. So the mistake doesn’t really take that much away from the purchase of the record, considering the inner record sleeve is still super cool and all. Other than that, the record sounds perfect to me, and I had no problems playing.
Sunflower sounds instrumentally and vocally different than the other two EPs, which took me by surprise. He ventures into different topics than prior works, even a love song titled Cinnamon, as well as a song called Deep Sea Diver, where he sings about feeling trapped into lying about who he really is and social norms. He wonders why we feel the need to fit in and why it's so hard to stand out. That's actually funny because this whole article is me explaining that Briston Maroney is “uniquely himself,” so Maroney if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I’m contradicting you. He explores a lot of topics in the ten-song album, encompassed in the broad theme of beauty.
The artwork on the record cover, on the inside especially, is very vivid, and I love it because it really pops visually if you decide to display it. The music videos for this album are also super cool. I would recommend watching the “visual album,” available on Youtube for free, a 40-minute short film that blends the music videos together. Briston Maroney made something special with that film, which is titled “Where To Aim When Taking A Stab At Beauty.” This film honestly made me view the album from a completely different perspective and made my love for the album as a whole grow exponentially. This album originally scored a 78 percent because it was so different from his other stuff, but after watching that film and relistening to the album a lot on my turntable, I think it’s in the eighties. I would say my score is about eighty-eight percent now, give or take.
Maroney is currently working on a new project, and whether it be a new EP, or his next album, I’m super hyped. From the snippets I've heard on his Instagram Live streams, I think it's going to be great. It sounds fresh and new compared to his previous work. His first two EPs were his start, and his debut album still included a lot of demos from the time those were made. He hasn’t released a whole project of his new flavor of music yet, and I’m very excited about it. He has already gotten fairly popular, and it's only a matter of time before he blows up in a bigger way. You might be late to the record-collecting trend, but you could be an early fan of Briston Maroney; you won’t regret it. Drop the needle and enjoy your music, people.
