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nothing is - filler
the rest is very good. at times it sounds like loveless lite, at other times it steps forward slighty. a track like new you seems like a step backward, albeit a very good one.
i think it explains why it took 22 years and so many false starts. it feels like a difficult compromise reached after they hit at the limits of their capacity and the inherent limits of the style itself.
you could cut out is this and yes and nothing is and maybe make the last track a holocaust section in another song and you'd have a very good ep.
at times they sound like serena maneesh or something you'd expect to hear in a very very good shoegaze band. and even the best shoegaze band are always tarred by the fact they are not mbv and can never come close to loveless.
kevin said the album "really frees them up". hopefully this is just the start of a revitalized band and there are many more to songs to come.
what struck me was how this album, especially in its weaker moments, seems to elucidate exactly why rock is in such a sorry state and has been since the times of loveless. there are admirable attempts to introduce drum and bass elements that you can tell they were really, really straining to make work. it's a very strange mix of the two styles. noone else has really made them work or combined them that well. a lot of the music in the late 90's tried to and only some of it had any success.
you would think "nothing is" is some party electronica rock song. it's almost skrillex like. then there is "wonder 2" which strays into incomprehensible avant noise territory. the two tracks don't fit together or sound like they belong to the same band. it gives the album an awkward and patchwork ending.
it's like it's not fair to blame mbv for the parts of this album that don't succeed because no one else has made them work that well either. maybe there are hints and traces in this album of a way to move forward. in a direction that is neither blatantly electronica or rock.
it's weird. we can all imagine better albums, we can all imagine something better to loveless but no one is able to do it.
the best song is "who sees you" which is just classic mbv and the equal of loveless.
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