I dunno, bands always say this and then nine times out of 10 their new music sounds pretty much like their old music. (I have NOT heard any of the other new Gang Of Youths music, just shooting the shit here.)
True story, James got me to like it more by comparing it to Father Of The Bride. 😬
Meanwhile… https://twitter.com/GabrielaJuneTC/status/1403576216334917633
Yeah I dunno, I've done more swinging back and forth since I wrote that part of the column on Friday. I am pretty sure I will only REALLY like it if it turns out to be satire. The Old Navy parody from the end of this column was a bit of a reality check, and I thought this critique was on-point.
Only Album Of The Week I can think of that wasn't clearly an album was Solange's True, which was also seven tracks and inspired similar contemplation about what constitutes an album
I was trying to tell Tom (who likes the album even more than I do) that the only reason she gets away with putting three ballads after "brutal" is that one of them is "drivers license." But yeah things start to fade around track 4, and then again at track 8. The shit that hits, though, it really hits.
In the Rolling Loud post (or maybe on Twitter) jackunderscore speculated that maybe Rocky's headliner status was contractually locked in before the pandemic, around the time he was getting a lot of goodwill due to his false imprisonment in Sweden. That could be true here. Or maybe fests just know they're gonna attract a bunch of hipster types who are still fucking with A$AP long after their mainstream relevance has dried up. Or maybe they're just hoping Rihanna will show up with him?
In general I think some heavy music dilettantes like myself tend to compare anything with dream-pop and black metal influences to Deafheaven. But more specifically, there's a part in "Masunaga Vapors" (where the harsh maximalist intensity briefly lets up and one solitary guitar melody breaks through like a head above water, then right away the all-consuming noise deluge kicks back in) that reminds me of about the 2-minute mark in Deafheaven's "Luna."
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