Antihoney certainly has one of the most interesting stories of artists that I know. If you're here, you probably already know about her, but I will summarize it just in case. (I apologize if I get any facts wrong here.) In 2007, a mysterious album called As We Kill the Night appeared on the Internet. The music itself was mystical, with its experimental, glitchy, ethereal dream pop, and it gained a cult following. In the late 2010s, Antihoney came out of hiding and started posting online, announcing she was returning to music. Her new project was a rework of her old songs, DENDRITE. The album was more elaborate and hi-fi than the old, and I like it quite a bit. It wasn't that well received by old fans because of how different it was, but I quite liked the art pop/chamber pop direction - this is where most fans and I disagree.
Her next album, Secrets, strayed further away from her old style. It's also a good album, but it certainly has its issues - poor mixing and production, and not nearly as much of an epic concept as her older albums, as it feels rather cobbled together and goes towards a more simple pop style. Still, I wanted to support her in the midst of old fans who hated on her new stuff.
Night Birds, on the other hand, just amplifies everything that was wrong with Antihoney's new projects to an embarrassing degree. Antihoney covers 13 classic pop, rock, and folk songs with sparse, simple, unnoteworthy piano/pop instrumentals. I think Antihoney is a good singer, but the vocals here are just horrendous - they're mixed obnoxiously loud, making them sound too close for comfort, especially for someone that has such a pixie-like voice as hers. And on top of that, every single song has so much autotune to the point that it makes her voice sound extremely warped, wobbly, and awkward. The instrumentals and vocals just do nothing for me - which is even worse when you consider it's an album of just covers of extremely famous songs we've, no doubt, already heard covered hundreds of times, like "Hallelujah", "Africa", and "Imagine".
I was interested in Antihoney's new direction more than other fans were, but this album just shows she pretty much lost all the creative and mystical spark that was present in her early material. I know it's probably not supposed to be a super serious project in her discography - a side project, even - so I probably don't need to be so publicly harsh on it... but I mean come on, it's 56 minutes long and it felt like such a massive waste of my time that I felt like writing this review.
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