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Originally Posted by chocolate_ladyland
was this any good? i didn't listen to it because it got shat on nearly everywhere. their first album is still one of my modern rock favs
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yeah it got a lot of hate, and ranking it that highly does seem a bit exorbitant (after 20 it's like completely arbitrary) but I did really enjoy it, seems quite disembodied and fragmented in a way which really accentuates both their endearing minimalism and their songwriting abilities. closer to weirdo rippers in that sense, although some of the poppier songs on here (the second and third tracks, running from a go-go etc.) really benefit from this new approach. closer to post-rock in its traditional, original sense ie the british approach of the early 90s: stripping rock down to its constituent parts and leaving it just floating about in the ether, letting each individual element breathe. some of it doesn't work, especially the more mechanical songs (especially lock box) but it's really good to here them challenge themselves like this in terms of process, and I think the strides made here will be consolidated and wholly capitalized on on their next LP or whatever. so yeah, more a process piece than anything else but interesting and overall 'fun'/'yipee' nonetheless.
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Originally Posted by pad_023
I first thought that but revisiting it a month later, it really clicked for me.
His synth sounds are so lush and organic. But in terms of hollow and vacuous I'm pretty surprised you but the James Ferraro album in yr list because I thought that pretty accurately described his new release haha
But in all seriousness I haven't really finished catching up yet to post my favourites but this album is a fucking blast. Stoner desert blues...
https://soundcloud.com/miemusic/sets...ask-at-huggie/ |
the difference for me lies in that ferraro is attempting to convey a certain coldness, it's a consciously bare album in accordance with its subject matter. it's a dark, bleak record and he imbues more coherent song structures with that intricate sound design he gave the similarly hollow and vacuous far side virtual with. conversely, lopatin seems to be trying to use this dull palette to illustrate something altogether more grand, as in that which we have purportedly relegated to the perfunctory and heartless is far more glorious than we give it credit, but it feels half-baked and thereby undermines what he's attempting to do. on a purely aesthetic/musical level, something like the back half of zebra or along give off that same intoxicating sense of stasis that made the earlier stuff so insanely awesome, but the rhythmic approach just sounds like amateur hour glass or reich.
so I don't know whether I can truthfully relegate a musical piece to the level that I have solely on the basis that it doesn't fulfill its intentions, but when it is ostensibly that bound up in conceptualism I don't think it can be wholly overlooked; that is, ferraro totally succeeds and lopatin falls a bit short.
plus I simply don't enjoy it as much as returnal, betrayed in the octagon, ruined lives et al. in fact that's probably it, when I think about it. they strove for emotional resonance and they delivered in spades, whereas r plus 7 goes a more oblique route so as to harness that same effect and in my mind just doesn't hit it, at least not as deftly/powerfully.