Skid Row (James Ferraro album)
| Skid Row | ||||
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| Studio album by James Ferraro | ||||
| Released | November 13, 2015 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 56:51 | |||
| Label | Break World | |||
| Producer | James Ferraro | |||
| James Ferraro chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Skid Row | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| God is in the TV |   |
| Pitchfork | 6.6/10 |
| Tiny Mix Tapes |  |
Skid Row is a studio album by American electronic musician James Ferraro, released on November 13, 2015 by the label Break World Records. Lyrically, it had previously existed as a series of poems before it turned into a set of lyrics for an album named after the crime-and-poverty-heavy Los Angeles area Skid Row. It is the Los Angeles counterpart to Ferraro's previous studio effort NYC, Hell 3:00 AM (2013). Its sound palette includes elements of funk, news reports, new jack swing, film scores, smooth jazz and 1980s rock and hip-hop. The album garnered generally positive reviews from music journalists upon its release.
When James Ferraro was raised in the early 1990s, his mother lived in New York City and his father in Los Angeles. While traveling back and forth to these homes every few years or less, he noticed the difference of trends and cultures that took place in the cities he went through, describing the experience as "like the internet before the internet had really evolved."Skid Row is a follow-up and the Los Angeles equivalent to Ferraro's previous LP NYC, Hell 3:00 AM (2013), a Hippos in Tanks release that was about the unwholesome part of New York City Ferraro saw that was unknown to most of the world and "a surreal psychological sculpture of American decay and confusion" as Ferraro described.
One time, when visiting the University of Southern California to meet a friend, Ferraro was authorized to use the virtual reality therapy software Bravemind, which is for war veterans to re-experience traumatic war events in order to relieve severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He described the virtual area he viewed while using the software as "lifeless and really void," and it inspired him to create a three-track extended play named War (2015) shortly after using the software, the same time he also began writing Skid Row. The experience with Bravemind painted the mood of the album that Ferraro conceived, saying that his Los Angeles experiences felt like a hyperreal war zone or a "psychic battlefield."Skid Row is about the city's relation to how the media dramatizes information about topics like the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1994 O. J. Simpson trial. Some parts of Los Angeles he saw are used on the record as metaphors, such as burning Toyota Prius cars showcasing how consumerism have caused people to ruin climate. The album is interlaced with online shopping commercials, which is a take on the culture of Silicon Valley according to God is in the TV.
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