There is definitely a difference between great ideas and executing those same ideas well. Anybody can think up the world’s first space shuttle/Olympic-sized pool/toaster oven, but if it is constructed horribly, it will about as successful as Garfield on the anti-lasagna diet. Scott Hardkiss has really great ideas: electro-funk fusion, songs about mermaids, eerie interludes that sound like music boxes. Before getting too excited though, listening through Technicolor Dream makes it clear that sometimes, the ’shuttle’ is a bus, the pool is inflatable and the oven is an easy-bake. This can be held true for all artists, but producers in particular are only as dope as the sounds they use. Unfortunately, Hardkiss’ latest often sounds like it was crafted out of a default-sounds stockpile. Yes, there is a lot of live-recorded guitar, vocals, etc., but try defending the idea that the voices on ‘Beat Freak’ do not sound like the speech function of old-ass apple computers is beyond all reason. Or give a listen to the title track and try to argue that the synth he uses did not come with whatever program he uses (or even something cheaper). As far as the vocals found throughout the album, while the female singers really shine, the men sound horrible. They might be ok, but there’s so much tampering with them for the most part that they just don’t sound cohesive. ‘The Underwater Ball’ features a narrator that sounds like sedatives with mouths and ‘What We Got’ makes the late-twenties, early-thirties male vocalist sound like he is trying to enunciate as though he were a well-off, snob of a teenage girl. Such a fusion of genres really would be great if pulled-off successfully, but there are so many poor choices in execution on Technicolor Dream that it’s hard to hand out points for effort.

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