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Mzmr, the name alone takes me back. It was made in a very odd time in my life. It sort of served as a tribute to all of the music that I had loved so dearly at the time. It was named after the fine song "Mezmer" by Pinkly Smooth, however it also drew inspiration elsewhere such as Avenged Sevenfold (especially City of Evil), the Fall of Troy, and even Tool... Those were pretty much the only bands I even listened to at that time though.
The album art has a silly history as it was based on the single album art for Mezmer when it released on Spotify... it never released on Spotify... Well... Not officially at least... You see, Pinkly Smooth, if you don't know, was a side-project band containing two of the members of Avenged Sevenfold. Those being Synyster Gates and, the main creative force, Jimmy "The Reverend Tholomew Plauge" Sullivan (known in Pinkly as just Rathead). In 2001, they released their sole EP, "Unfortunate Snort," later remixed in 2002, this time in pink. Those two releases are not only the only music they've put out, but also the means of acquiring them that they've officially put out as well. For the most part, the vast majority of people have only listened to Pinkly Smooth through either unofficial Youtube releases, or through shared files. The very few who had CDs weren't too much luckier either, it's still recorded in pretty poor quality there as well. Anyways, I believe around 2022, Synyster Gates, long after The Rev's death, talked about remastering this EP, and then putting it out onto Spotify. And while to this day that remaster wasn't put out, there are still frequent bootleg uploads of Unfortunate Snort put onto Spotify. This was my first time finding one of those, not knowing the history.
Around the end of 2022 I discovered that there were new topic uploads of most of the Unfortunate Snort songs as singles with unique art (except The Body of Death of the Man with the Body of Death for some reason). And best of all, they were of slightly better quality than the terrible Youtube uploads!! Could these be the aforementioned remasters??
Anyways they were later taken down right before I released Mzmr, and I found out that both the releases were unofficial and that the album arts were AI generated. This was like, right after AI got popular, with ChatGPT having just gone public at the time. I don't blame myself for not being able to tell. It looked kinda cool but absolutely did not fit the music and also if I looked at it now I probably would've been able to tell. The art depicted a castle that was all swirly and rainbowy. That's why everyone is a different color and why there's a guy who's multicolored and holding a lolipop (in the Youtube release, I removed it for Spotify n stuff because it was a sticker from Paint 3D that I thought would've made it get rejected by Routenote). Everyone is drawn how they would draw themselves because the subject of Track 1 said that's how people should be drawn. That's why the old man is shaky and uses caligraphy, Little Billy is a crayon scribble (and later in the remaster, a crayon stick figure), and the person tripping balls on a lolipop (again, the subject of Track 1) looks like he was drawn by someone tripping balls on a lolipop.
The background I feel definitely did a better job capturing the colorfulness that the Mzmr unofficial release had. Very rainbowy and awesome. I love the white stuff that looks like frost. Reminds me of Antarctica in Doritos Crash Course 2. Very edible looking. I wanna eat the background I made. I like candy.
Because of how much I loved it at the time, this was the first album I put onto Spotify and other streaming services. I had already released Dreamings and maybe even Complete Dystopia by that point in time. For long after I released Mzmr, I considered it the gold standard for Lyup albums. And I mean, it was definitely a milestone. I'm pretty sure it was the longest I had worked on an album at that time (laughing in Apocalypse Weekend). I think I just struck lightning in a bottle, because I had a lot of motivation, a lot of inspiration, a lot of influences, a lot of creativity, and I just so happened to choose a bunch of melodies that don't make my songs sound empty as [insert politician or billionaire you dislike here]'s skull.
Anyways, now that we're done with that essay, let's get to the essay you actually came for. The one where I actually review the fucking music.
I often forget how Big Boy Timmy is nearly 4 minutes long, that's because Mzmr-era me was used to much longer songs, like 5 minute songs on average. In fact I feel like song length is kinda a big reason why I don't typically listen to A7x that much anymore. I feel like 4-6 minutes is the length that a song starts to drag on a bit too long. A song that's like 3 minutes or less kinda does what I felt was necessary and then ends where it needed to. A song that's 7+ minutes will change enough to stay interesting the entire time. A song that's 4-6 is in that weird sour spot where some people don't feel it's necessary to change that much, but no, it's definitely necessary. This song kinda falls into that trap at the end with the chorus repeating way more than it should. However, with exception to that part it does a good job changing things up, between the three choruses, all the verses are pretty unique and different. And it also starts off with a killer drum intro with that metallic sound reminiscent of the intro to "Boxing Day" by Car Seat Headrest (even though it was long before I'd listen to that). The drumming style, as you can probably tell, is very Avenged Sevenfold inspired... albeit it's not possible to play on the real drums because I'm pretty sure it hits like, two drums, two symbols, and a kick at the same time... multiple times... yea I kinda didn't understand that you need an ENTIRE ARM to hit just a single thing on a drumkit.
Gotta love that third verse with the toms, it's amazing. I'm pretty sure I just put random notes into lmms, cleaned them up a bit, and that was that.
The Day is a bit repetitive, and I also kinda forgot that the song existed until right before releasing the album. To be honest I probably should've just thrown it away but it's definitely placed in the right spot on the album at least.
OH MY GOSH FUCK KNIVES THIS SONG IS ACTUALLY SO ANNOYING AND TERRIBLE AND AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. NOTHING IS EVEN ON BEAT EITHER WTF??? Ok at like 1:10 things start to get a bit cool. Lots of clipping though. This album kinda starts really poorly if I'm being honest. Big Boy Timmy is a banger but like, the rest of the early tracks don't inspire much confidence when all the later tracks are much better. The title is in reference to a famous clip of The Rev repeating a movie quote, "One day, dude, I’m just gonna get off the bus, and I’m gonna.. I’m gonna run into the woods, and I’m Never coming back! And when I come back, I’m gonna be the knife master!" I only realized it was a movie quote after I quoted it the next month to my brother and he was like "Oh is that from, idk what movie that is but like it's from a movie..." and I was like "No I was quoting The Rev" and he was like "My co-worker literally quoted it like last week" and so he asked his coworker the next day and so his coworker was like "Oh yea I was quoting The Rev, but yea it's from a movie or something" so yea that was funny. Kinda wish this song wasn't the one I dedicated to the iconic quote though. But I mean, it's not THAT bad.
Okay The Inbetween state of Silence and saying Mean Words to a Child has an AMAZING intro. The guitars are a bit too loud tho tbh, hurt a bit to listen too. Clipping is terrible with this album. Okay and then the static part is cool. I made it sound like rushing water cause I was on a ferry the month before releasing this album and yea. I made it sound like when you go in and out of the doors and the water gets muffled and then BOOM it's LOUD! But then back to muffleeeeee. Oh yea and the Discord pings. Yea so this part was meant to sound like a Tool intermission, but I kinda thought it'd be bad if one track was just the intermission so I put it in the middle of an actual song. Ticks and Leeches style. Repetitive outro with the guitars that hurt. Made it sound like there was water in my ears lol.
Peaceful Jimmy was the most poorly named song on this album because I was like "Okay so this song is very peaceful so I'm gonna put Peaceful in the name" and then I was like "Okay so I have a bunch of songs with names as the titles, but not one with Jimmy yet so I'll do that" and so the title became what it was like and I was like "Oh damn, that sounds like it's about him being dead" and it REALLY doesn't help that the beginning sounds like a heartbeat monitor and the end sounds like song zenful heaven. Anyways yea this one is one of my absolute favorites not just on this album but in general. I love the Earthboundy intro and then it jumps into this really 8-bit explodey thing with killer drums and then the soothing synths. MMMMM awesome. When I imagine the song during the explody part I always think of the ai generated Mezmer cover art. All they rainbowy ness. It's awesome I really captured that aesthetic well.
Swinging on a Fragile Little Branch Like a Menace to Society, Long title God damn. The loud synth is actually pretty cool. The inbetween parts are very classical-ish and remind me of the Portal 2 OST. I guess that means I did a pretty good job replicating A7x if I'm comparing it to classical as I know Synyster Gates commonly describes the way he writes those nice melodies as literal just Mozart. This one is great. It's also one of my dad's favorites at the time at least, as he mentioned it had the most structure out of any song I've made before.
Australia is really cool. Doesn't fit Mzmr that much to be honest but it's really cool. It honestly gives Dreamings vibes, this would totally be one of the better songs on that album lol. At about 1:06 the melody interupts itself but not in a way that sounds godawful like in most Dreamings songs. The song then flips upside-down and backwards, just like AUSTRALIA?!??!?!?! Yea that's literally why I called it that lol.
Jeremy was an attempt to make something more Pinkly-esque, and like, yea no I didn't do a good job on that part, but it's still a VERY good song!! Has very cool parts, especially at like 1:02. Very fitting for Mzmr or even Dreamings. The part at 1:44 when the piano parts start to stack are really cool. Very circus-esque which is surprising cause I was very bad at making that kinda stuff at the time. To be honest I tend to forget I called a song this.
BLATANT THEFT LET'S GOO. This song is awesome, it started off as one of my absolute favorites but I think by the time the album released I started to dislike it a bit. But after relistening to it, it gets REALLY cool. Like, it actually REALLY deserves its near 5 minute runtime. The buildup is really good and I'm surprised the song doesn't sound super empty. The title is in reference to the TFOT song "Whacko Jacko Steals the Elephant Man's Bones" because 1. it has a part that feels directly stolen from that song (that chorus which has the long stretch of short, fast notes) and 2. the title is already a reference to theft. That part from 3:20 IS SUPER COOL OMFG!!!!!! The tempo changes are amazing and it has such a super schizo-circus vibe too!!!!!!!!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. The accoustic guitar in this song is amazing. I love the part where the guitar starts to break due to the tempo changes. You always know a lyup song is about to be good when I break out the accoustic guitar synth, because it is SO FUCKING DIFFICULT TO USE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHH. This song really knows how to build suspense and make transitions. This went from one of my absolute favorites on the album (still didn't top BBT or Little Billy, though), to one that I thought was just boring and longwinded for no reason, back to quite possibly being my ABSOLUTE favorite (or maybe second, Idk if it tops Peaceful Jimmy) and definitely one of my all-time favorites in Lyup history.
Quick and Fast is cool, it's not boring, not offensively bad, not very noteworthy though. This was also an attempt at me recreating Pinkly with that up and down riff. That was me kinda just not understanding how Ska worked at the time though. I ended up creating something more loony tunes esque than anything. But to be fair, looney tunes is definitely a huge influence in Avant-Garde Metal in general. You can hear that in basically all of Mr. Bungle's Disco Volante and California, neither of which I had listened to at the time, but if we compared to Pinkly, you can hear it a bit in Pixel and Nasal.
Mzmr was another attempt at Pinkly just focusing on Piano mostly. I basically just copied stuff I learned in my music theory class at the time, I wasn't very good at writing for Piano yet to be honest. This song isn't that offensive though, not terrible. Sounds more like a wedding song though, y'know?? Kinda double downed with the organ, there. Couldn't even write solos that well at the time, which was what I was trying to do at the end of the song. It was meant to be like the end of Mezmer by Pinkly Smooth. Most of the time I wrote something good for piano on this album, it was by pure luck. The drums do go very hard on this track, regardless of when they are or aren't on beat. I actually love the chaos of this track.
Little Billy, named after a movie my mom and I watched together, was one of my absolute favorites on this album when I first wrote it. I love the metal riff that then immediately switches to tritones. Then the piano doing a bunch of gibberish with the drums is so cool. Then the riffing with the kicks in the background that then turns into the piano stuff in the middle with the effects is amazing. Then the kicks and snares slow down and then the guitar comes in and then it speeds back up!!! WOOOOOO!! The drums are also super amazing too not to mention!!! It does a lot of complicated fast stuff and then complicated slow stuff which is HOW. YOU. METAL!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! I put this second to last cause it was my absolute favorite.
The album ends on static that was meant to simulate ocean waves. Depending on the headphones you use it actually does sound like ocean waves, too. I was able to trick at least one person into thinking it was actually the ocean. The guitar solos during the waves, it's meant to feel like The Fall of Troy's Phantom on the Horizon. The middle parts are also super cool. They really metal this stuff in. This song and by extension just the whole album has a lot of jammy stuff, y'know? This song is super empty but it's by choice cause it's meant to be all ocean like, this is the end of the album. It's supposed to feel chiller, but also give that final metal rush. That's why it's called Finale.
After relistening to Mzmr, I'm surprised by just how well it holds up!! Majority of the songs are not just good but great, actually!! The 2nd-4th songs range from okay to bad, but like, wow. This album isn't as terrible as Dreamings or Complete Dystopia. Hell, it's not even as physically painful, either!! This is, overall a great album.
I think Mzmr is the transition period between Old and New Lyup. Red Abyss and the Cone is old Lyup where I just make whatever with no real idea of what I'm going for with sound. Dreamings and onwards, that's New Lyup, that's me trying to make something based on a certain sound and aesthetic that I'm going for. It definitely leads to more consistency, and such better songs. But sometimes it feels something is missing, and in that case, when something's missing, it tends to apply to the whole album.
The reason why I call this album the transition period though, is because, while I was still trying to get a certain sound, I kinda didn't follow through all the way. Either because of total skill restraint, or because of the fact that I just wanted to make something different. This album was still me kinda just messing around with my toys in a way. Really cool.
This album will forever be an important part in my discography. This is the milestone. This is the mark.
This. is. Mzmr.
(Available on most music streaming services.)