Stef Animal
Top Gear

Today, I want to introduce the review with a simple word, the one I consider the most suitable word to represent the album I'm about to review

Nostalgia

Top Gear, debut from New Zealander Stef Animal, is pure and immense nostalgia, the kind that wraps around your body, that warms your soul, that lovingly pampers you, that makes you feel happy, but at the same time deeply sad, because the nostalgia that embraces you so lovingly is nothing but the epiphany of a thousand essences of past times, which you probably haven't even lived through (if you're from '95 like me), and which were nothing but an illusion created to mask the ugliness of those times.

But let's leave aside the cursed poet stuff and get to normal things, like the question you're probably asking right now: but what is this Top Gear?

Top Gear is an electronic music album, consisting of 15 tracks totaling 29 minutes, rather short, but it has a particular characteristic: each of the 15 tracks was composed and played on a different "instrument" and recorded in a single session. We see these 15 instruments "posing" proudly on the album's cover, and they are all old-school gadgets except one. 5 Keyboards (one of which is a children's piano), 5 multitimbral MIDI synthesizers (a must for PC gaming in the '90s), 2 computers, a console, an arbitrary waveform generator, and even an electronic duck call.

And you cannot imagine (I repeat, IMAGINE) what the result is

Stef handles those instruments with a mastery that SCARES half the electronic scene, blending the purity of ambient music with VGM, plus a thousand hidden influences here and there, with results that in certain points even veer into the cinematic (and even I dare not imagine how bloody hard it must be to create such atmospheres without seeming exaggerated or unnecessarily pompous).

From the pulsating rhythms of "You Have Powers!" to the retro mood of "Running Music," from the "steam" of "The TGV" (which sounds like the jingle of one of those strange brands you see in tapes or DVDs for Home Entertainment) to the gloomy mood of Cave Story (made with the first computer on the list, the BBC Micro, and which in less than a minute creates an atmosphere worthy of applause), and then beyond.

But to me, the masterpieces are, precisely, 5:

- "Ducks," the track made by sampling the sounds of the duck call, which entertains you but at the same time surprises you;

- "In the Pines," an atmospheric and nocturnal track that sends shivers due to how enveloping it is;

- "Dragon Swirl," a low tempo with austere and touching melodies, made with the world's smallest synth (the Ploytec PL2);

- "The Golden Condor," the track made with the second computer on the list (the Amiga 500), which blows all those assholes who use FL Studio with VST out of the water and then say, "I make music on the Amiga, I do!";

- "Our Spanish Dream," the concluding track, and also the longest (almost 4 minutes), which ends the whole work in an exemplary manner, with whispered and emotional choruses, suspended atmospheres, and a leading melody that would give chills even to corpses.

Top Gear is an unstoppable whirlwind of emotions that hits you fully, but with an impressive sweetness. It takes you and makes you relive for a palpable half hour the times when you were a child, when all you needed was a turned-on TV, a few tapes, and video games from the era (from your era). And after that half hour ends, everything disappears, and you are left devastated, on your knees, in tears, and heartbroken by the distance that now separates you from that era of joy and carefreeness. But at the same time, you feel happy, happy for what you have seen, happy for what you have heard, happy for what you have lived.

...and I swear that while I'm writing these last lines, I'm holding back a flood of tears as long as the Po (after almost 8 years since it last happened), so I don't want to hold you any longer.

Rush to listen to this album right away, I'm going to hook up the Nintendo 64