In section one, they’re trying to figure out what’s going on with them, haunted by chronic illness, wondering why they’re not “normal” or “ordinary” like everyone else, if it all stemmed from something they did wrong, or if it was something they had no control over and could never have done anything about. Up until this point, we’ve seen various appearances of a strangely hairy humanoid figure vaguely reminiscent of the character from My Pal Foot Foot and Know Thy Self. The swirls get denser, then sketchier, and then finally flicker away, as we enter the third section, what I call “the I Want To Be Well section” (it makes if you’ve seen the video).
Then the drums cut out, as Bosh sleds through abstract spirals and gives you a moment to contemplate the implications of that. The music visualization also sets up the concept of visualizing the flutes with these swirly spirals, which then creates a really powerful moment at the end of this second section, right after the words on screen that (almost) represent the lyrics: For example, the music visualizations of the drums as squares and circles that the track opens with drop out unceremoniously around the 45-second mark for no apparent reason, but they’ve laid the groundwork for the Xs visualizing the claps, which then creates a really powerful moment a minute later when music-synced layer-automation animating the Xs suddenly reveals after the lyric “do yourself” the words “A DEATH”, the first time the character in the video contemplates suicide (and shortly after the first time in the piece there’s dismount immediately followed by a remount, setting up that this is representative of some sort of suicidal attempt or ideation), marking the start of the second section of the piece, where this must now be reckoned with. There are lots of little ways that I Want To Be Well subtly, sneakily shifts in tone over the course of the video, that might sound like mistakes if described straightforwardly. It’s not always legible, but it’s easy to get the sense that the more important bits are more legible and it’s ok if you don’t catch every word, and it also feeds into a general tone of emotional stress and distortion. Ava has made lyrics-heavy Line Rider releases before, and the Friends in Low Places -style scrawl is re-used in certain key moments to great effect, but the majority of the lyrics in I Want To Be Well are drawn out in a new distinctive stylization, a kind of all-caps font where the words bend and twist around each other and the track itself. The majority of I Want To Be Well could be described as some form of lyric video. With that out of the way, this review is essentially going to be me gushing about all the things I love about this piece, so here we go! If you haven’t seen it, and you can stomach the themes, I highly recommend it. Which is to say, I Want To Be Well, in my view, is Line Rider at its absolute best. All at once, it’s a lyric video, a music visualizer, a story of personal struggle, and a choreographed traversal through an animated comic book about mental illness. This is not to say she’ll never go on to create bigger and better things in the future, but looking at her body of work as it stands today, I Want To Be Well is a culmination of thoughts and ideas and experiments and techniques and messages she’s been messing with and working on since she started with Line Rider back in February 2021. It’s hard to know where to start with this one, so I’ll start here: This feels to me like Ava Hofmann’s Line Rider magnum opus. 👎 = not recommended I Want To Be Well - Ava Hofmann I’m so glad to have as many recurring guest reviewers as I do, and I strongly hope this continues into the future.Ĭlick here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Please take care of yourselves.Īlso, I’m thrilled to welcome back Ava Hofmann as guest reviewer for Just Far Enough, as well as Twig (from the channel Branches) for Anemoia 2. Don’t watch the videos or read the reviews unless you’re okay with reading descriptions of specific methods of suicide and well as seeing depictions of specific suicidal acts (though depictions are a bit more abstract in No Surprises ). I do want to issue an especially heavy suicide content warning for the first two reviews in this roundup ( I Want To Be Well and No Surprises ). Don’t worry, there are no 4,000-word reviews of 45-minute tracks this month, just a number of longish reviews of regular-length releases because there’s a lot to say! I called last month’s roundup a doozy, which is the exact same thing I want to say about this one now.
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