Synth Single Review: “Empty World” by Aeronexus & Video Kids
by Karl Magi
Aeronexus & Video Kids’ “Empty World” explores the entanglement of two disparate realities as it begins gently with computerized tones shining and reverberating in a tumbling line, full of a leaping melody. Groovy percussion and a jingling tambourine support the quickly flying vocals, moving with complicated feelings, in an exuberant performance.
Funky bass tangles with the punchy underlayer while the lead singer smoothly and vibrantly punches home the encouraging, memory-filled melody. As the exciting synthesized glow spreads, the song’s emotional depth takes hold of me and I am carried on its tide. Swinging beats add synth-pop joy to them while glockenspiel tones spin out in iridescent lines.
A voiceover echoes before the vocalist carries the joy, release and nostalgia within the lyrics. A synth solo accelerates with uplifting, wildly soaring energy that bursts over the music like a supernova. The percussion briefly drops away before the lead singer brings back life and gruff power before silence falls.
For our narrator, “a thought so in its place takes hours to come by,” and by then the world has already passed them by. Experiencing “arrested dreams and fear in Paradise,” the two aspects of the character are told, “I’ll heal you, release you, then take you out of time.” They ask to be released from “this corner of my mind” and healed.
After spending all of their life “living in the calmness of this empty world” while trying to keep the past’s magic alive, they find that “it’s burning up my soul.” It makes for an empty world still, as our storyteller notes, “we’re out of time for reason and for rhyme and it goes by.”
Both aspects of the character are “the bearers of the earth divide” as Heaven and Hell collide. They go on to say, “don’t let it squeeze you, consume you, have you forsake the present time.” To conclude, the narrator says that “there’s no need to take you to a place that lives only in your mind.”
