• Drama

ReeToxA - Soliloquy

Think of this: You get a call from your friend, and you are invited to a group bicycle ride around the neighborhood. An album you would put on shuffle in your earphones as you cycle around the area: Soliloquy by ReeToxA. The album is an archive of a life. Listening to the record for the first time feels like hearing compressed genres in 26 tracks. The album is written across decades and finalized in isolation. It plays like a diary spoken out loud. The opener, ReeToxA, is a statement of identity. It declares a voice, messy and immediate. The song that follows, Insatiable, has some urgency to it. It is like pushing desire into something restless and unresolved. Akaroa is next and expands the field to be coastal, cinematic, and reflective. Bottle feels foundational, like a relic carried through time.  There is the a run of character-driven songs: Dancing with Lou, Thrift Shop Dress, The Lisa Song, and Gown, all form the album’s most intimate stretch. Names and objects become emotional containers. This is where the album shifts into personal mythology. It is also where small details carry disproportionate weight.  Record features songs like Truce that act as a pause. Josephine and Jade Eyes return to longing, but with sharper edges. Now there is less nostalgia and more confrontation. As this seeps, mid-album, the tone darkens. You hear songs like Alcohol 2, that don’t dramatize addiction and observe it, almost clinically. Demand Perfection feels like self-interrogation, rigid and tense. Erica and the Stars opens upward again. It offers space but with very little relief. Timor Leste and Stare at the Sea shift toward distance, which is somewhat geographical and emotional. The album momentarily escapes the self, but it is only to reflect it differently. And then comes instability. Schitzo Waltz fractures rhythm and tone. It embodies a mental fracture. Love Keeps Burning Still resists that collapse and holds onto continuity. You Deserve Better Than Me is one of the album’s clearest emotional statements. It is direct, painful, and unadorned.  The next stretch of songs that follow becomes even more physical. With Purple Vein and Dress Me Up, the focus shifts onto the body. The songs talk about appearance, blood, surface vs interior. Identity here feels constructed. It feels like it is worn rather than just lived. Towards the end, the album then turns outward again. War Killer introduces conflict beyond the self. It talks about violence as both an external and internal force. Girls Rock is dreamy in the sense that it injects momentum, almost a release, though still grounded in the album’s tension (even rhythmically more driving).  Wake Up Lucy feels like a call song to another person, or to the self. Strong tries to work with reconstruction, but there is no clean resolution there. The last song on the album, Alright closes the album quietly.  Overall, the album is a good fit for a movie like Requiem for a Dream (2000). Read More

• 1 h : 25 min
• 8.5