Buzz Album Review:
Created as a final project for a music history class I was taking, this album review discusses the themes singer-songwriter NIKI approaches through her third studio album Buzz. An option for the final project was to creatively present the album review, and I chose a zine format wherein I was able to balance both images and text in a way that reflected the music. One takeaway from the album was its turbulent nature; songs about falling in love paired with kickass music about getting over a relationship, a pendulum of overzealous feelings and apathy towards an ex. I wanted to explore that feeling through the layout of the zine, where text blocks bounce around and interact with the titles and images.
When laid out like so, the text blocks themselves are dancing and have a musical quality to them, as if keeping in time with rhythm. The chosen images were various shades of a blue tone that was very evident in the album artwork and branding. However, I felt that the red, which is also found on the album cover, was more striking and expressed both the anger and passion that underlines every word sung in the project.