EVERY GENRE PROJECT - February 20 - Big Room House

Genre of the Day - Big Room House

Album of the Day - Wave Runner by CAPSULE (2015)

Big day for those who came into adulthood around 2011. Maybe that’s some of my readership, maybe not, but I feel that anyone my age and up remembers the time that EDM exploded and became ubiquitous on the Internet and extended release drops in songs became the ire of my mom for whom the musical anticipation and release mixed with all those strange metallic synths was a little too stressful and wonky. Big room house was a major driver and player in those changes in music’s landscape, although its heyday is very much in the rearview mirror. 

Big room house feels sort of like a supernova, necessary and transformative in the rise of EDM’s popularity generally but with a quickly fading presence. At the same time, it died quickly, perhaps due to some negative connotations and perhaps the idea of douchiness associated with some of its DJs: Mixmag described it the music as being driven by “spotless, monotone production aesthetics.” 

Perhaps this was an inevitability given the fact EDM festivals’ explosion in popularity laid the ground for big room house: to cater for the audience that had tapped into the metallic sounds appearing all around pop music in the festival context, the music perhaps had to reach a consensus. However, contemporary judgments of music rarely do them justice, and to me the compositions of people like Hardwell (the creator of today’s second top album) are still full of energy and life. They’re symbolic of a particular time and the way genre has to bend to an audience.

Inevitably, RateYourMusic users are also kind of haters in this regard. Today’s highest album only notched a 2.46/5. That’s not even 50% of stars. Unsurprisingly with RYM as well, the group sitting pretty at #1 are outliers from the biggest names in big room house and often dabble outside of it across this album. There’s a lot here that feels identifiable with big room house; metallic, simple synths promising big build ups and releases that satisfy like candy like “Feel Again.” However, they lean into grittier content as well such as the acid-house influenced “Dancing Planet”, and I think across melodically Japan being less common as an EDM country also helps them add a unique angle, and the vocals here feel full of passion and deliberately sketched out rather than the placeholders of some other EDM from this time. At the end of the day, haterism is temporary; music is forever.