Our beloved climatewave artist Alternate Skies has released his album 24 Hour Forecast on vinyl for pre-order this week. I thought it would be a perfect time to finally review one of their albums, so why not start with this one to celebrate the vinyl release.

For those not familiar with the climatewave / weathersoft genre, take everything you love about vaporwave and throw it on top of weather channel clips, music and sound bites. It’s actually pretty interesting to hear there is a generic jazzy musical style behind every great weather channel broadcast. As such, when it came time to mix it with vaporwave it just felt natural.

I remember every winter morning turning to the weather channel to see if schools would be announced out thanks to snow. This is probably my own connection to the weather station yet every track on this album hits me in a blast from the past kind of way.

For example in the song 1. Min Weather Report, you might not even have lived in the American State this broadcast is from, yet it feels oddly like home. Weather reports didn’t run every second of the day so waiting was typical to the process of being informed in the 90s. The music in the background is generic enough that it sounds like your local station and the women voice, you know what she looks like from her first words.

The minutes up and the weatherman is now live with today’s forecast. There’s a storm and you’ll need your umbrella if you go out. Some Storms May Be Severe (track 6) in your area it might be better if you stayed in… What stands out the most to me is the voice clearly (or not so clearly) is from a CRT TV. I don’t know what it is about that kind of quality but you feel a CRT like audio codec in it. That alone takes me back.

And really that’s why I like this album so much. Not too often do we even look at a weather channel any more. We don’t need too with the cellphones in our pockets with to the second updated accuracy.

Kids don’t need to check the tv to see if school is out, they’ll get a text from their teacher or an email from the school. TV broadcasts are so HQ these days that there’s no difference between a spoken conversation in your room vs the weatherman voice.

These are new exciting times we live in, even much so when artists like Alternate Skies takes the time to document a period in time we no longer need and provides enjoyable entertainment to relive the past.

I will add one last track I want to talk about, track 17, A Look At Your Radar, I love the guitar melody on this. I don’t know why but it totally reminds me of the the first months of owning DISH Network satellite TV back in the 90s. My Dad was working for the company and we had to be the first in the neighborhood with the giant “dish” attached to our house. Funny enough DISH Network is still around, I couldn’t imagine paying for their TV services with the internet and Netflix.

I would go through more tracks but I think the experience of listening to the album in full is more rewarding to your imagination than me explaining my memories. Most tracks are around a minute long making this 17 track album easily to experience multiple times in a breeze.

If you enjoyed this album review, like i said Pre-orders for the vinyl was announced this week at $25.95 currently. It comes in a sky blue (perfect weather) vinyl with a gloss finished sleeve all delivered shrinnk wrapped for your opening enjoyment. Not too often do we get weathersoft on vinyl, this will be a collectors item for many.