New Beginnings

Teen Daze has come some ways since its bedroom-produced days of Four More Years and From My Bedroom Floor. Five years later and Teen Daze has been able to keep a quick pace (five albums in five years) while maturing his music without losing his original sound. Morning World still retains that synth-pop quality and there is still an aesthetic pleasure found in nature, but now this feels expanded, there is more connection between the aesthetic and the sound and it all fits perfectly for this album.

Morning World kicks off with the song “Valley of Gardens” and it is a pretty fitting opening for an album that encapsulates a “beginning of the day” kind of vibe; strings make up about three-quarters of the song until they finally break away into lyrics about the “leaving of winter.” Later on, “Post Storm” will take up a similar formula to this opener, with the majority of the song made up of a slow, relaxing synthetic beat until about the last minute or so. “Pink” follows “Valley of Gardens” and starts to bring Morning World up to pace and starts bringing in more of the synth-pop sound. So far (and through the rest of it) the album sounds really positive and kind of uplifting in some ways. The closing song, rightfully named “Good Night,” gracefully slows everything down and brings the album to an end.

The whole idea of greeting the world is found throughout the entire album; it is an idea of new beginnings in some ways. All the synthesized sound creates that image of the first crack of sunlight at dawn when everything is still hazy and misty and that early morning crispness is still held onto with the added percussion and strings. It is that time of day where it is known that everything starts over fresh, and Morning World might just be Teen Daze’s way of announcing his own similar recharge.