BrunuhVille
New Age, 2014

Aurora is pretty much what I expect when I drop down money for BrunuhVille’s music. Lots of dramatic sweeping anthems full of strings, flutes, and other new age accouterments with the occasional soprano providing some “aah-aah-aah” warbling to complete the ambiance. The whole thing is very Buddha bar, like taking some happy pill and thinking that Vangelis is playing in one’s head. The tracks here could easily be the soundtrack from a sword and sorcery movie or even video game, especially with words like “wolf” and “dragon” and “Elysium” in their titles. It’s like the DeviantArt of the World of Yanni: clichés are everywhere.

Still, they are a lovely kind of cliché. The Essence of Life is sweeping and chill-inducing, with some lovely aria as icing on the cake. Aeternum is epic, dramatic, and lush – the kind of music that plays when our dramatic heroes board the spacecraft for the final, most likely fatal, mission to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth. Falls of Glory is for that moment when our heroes prepare to march against an enemy army of overwhelming odds, never faltering even a minute for they know that real men die in battle, for Sparta, et cetera. And then, when everyone dies, Cry of the Dragons plays as the camera slowly pans over the faces of the dead sods before fading to black and letting the credits roll.

Aurora can sound magnificent and grand, but at the same time, the tracks can also feel too generic for their own good. I like what I’m listening to, but I also often wonder where I’ve heard it before.