A Life Lived Twice

Type: Album

Score: 6/10

Date modified: Sep 1, 2026

This is the first album by my son Oakfield and despite the score I’m very impressed. I will preface that I’m not super into entirely ambient (or just instrumental because I’m not too sure this can be considered ambient) music, while it can certainly sound nice I frankly don’t have a strong enough grasp of music theory to appreciate it much deeper than that. It’s kind of like drawn art for me, without context I probably wouldn’t be able to say what makes the Mona Lisa much better than something drawn by a random guy.

That said, I quite enjoyed this album. Even if it’s mainly leaning on drums and guitar (I think) it still manages to maintain some variety in its sound (though that said if it was much longer than 23 minutes issues may have started cropping up). There was even Sun Set and Keep Me in Mind which are completely different to everything else with some much more relaxed synth melodies. It kind of reminds me of what CPU Buddha did on their self titled album with if we cannot meet… which was my favourite part there. Definitely less effective here but still very cool. Keep Me in Mind even subverts what I expected by finishing off with the same intensity of the rest of the album. It was a really cool finish and if I had one complaint it’d be that it could’ve gone even harder. I can also say this sounds very thought out and worked on, most songs have their own defined vibe while still leading somewhere and never sticking with one idea for too long. My two favourite songs on here are definitely Personalized Advertising and Post_Life, Post_Life especially has a ridiculously strong intro and manages to maintain a similar energy throughout and even build on it.

For what I thought could’ve been done better, I only have one real issue and then some nitpicks with the real issue being the mixing. The mixing is serviceable at best, and while it’s generally not sabotaging my experience sometimes it is. The worst example of this is Kaleid. I already wasn’t super in love with the song but when it starts playing primarily in one ear it’s all over, worse yet, the part where it plays in one ear is the start of my favourite section of the song. I don’t know if this is a personal thing from destroying my ears playing music way too loudly or what but my left ear fucking sucks and it’s very uncomfortable for me to listen to sounds in only it for any period over like a couple seconds. I could just listen in mono but that’d flatten songs that were mixed more skillfully if I forget to turn it off (which I will) and doesn’t really invalidate this criticism. If he wanted it to be listened to in mono he would’ve mixed it as such. It kind of reminds me of songs released in the 60s like pre-white album Beetles where they just had no fuckin clue how the stereo format should be used because it had been very new at the time so they were just kind of dicking around. Sidenote but it shocks and upsets me frankly that they don’t get more shit for how dogshit their songs sound on stereo, like genuinely how do you manage to ruin a song as good as Eleanor Rigby, kill your sound engineer. Fortunately (or unfortunately here) we’re not living in the 60s so I feel there’s even less of an excuse to have done this. More minorly I think the repetition of audio panning effects really hurts Black Star, it was interesting the first time but when it happened for the second time like 30 seconds later it made me feel like the song has just looped around which killed the vibe for me. Doesn’t help that the same audio panning effect also happened to already have been used on Personalized Advertising and actually done better, nothing is novel about it by this point. I also feel that the volume could’ve and should’ve been played with more, this goes for most of the album but especially around 1:08 on Personalized Advertising because I’m dead serious in thinking that moment should’ve blasted out my eardrums and instead, if anything, it only got quieter. As for criticisms that are more pet peeves than serious critique, I really wish there was no fading to the end of songs. It feels way more organic to me when it’s absent and it’s more of just a sudden stop and honestly I feel like it’d fit this album more. I also have to say the song names could’ve been better, as good as the song is, Personalized Advertising is such a generic name for a song on an album like this (wrong spelling btw you’re not American) and while I’m not sure where the name Kaleid came from I really hope it’s a reference to Depeche Mode instead of to an XBOX controller. My main issue though is that I want more and it doesn’t exist. I am very excited to see what he makes next because this is one of the few projects made by a friend which I don’t have to pretend to enjoy.