"If Always Foreign was their Local Business, the more straightforward letdown following the breakthrough masterpiece, this new one is their The Most Lamentable Tragedy, scaling up the old bombast in every conceivable way."
Well shit, that's all you had to say (and I'm saying that as someone both fond of Local Business and who routinely cackles at how only with +@ could a near Shakespearean double album somehow be called "underrated" and have it stick.)
Buzz has it this one got deployed because the OG version is doing numbers on Tiktok.
While I get the point of the Taylor's Version rereleases as Tom mentions in the write up, I feel like 1989 and Reputation are going to be the least essential inclusions, and this version kinda shows why. With Red and everything before it, there's enough distance in terms of recording capabilities, who Swift is as a person, and what she can do as a vocalist that doing find/replace re-recordings is at least an interesting lesson in contrasts. Meanwhile, this is just the same song with very slightly different vocals.
Saw her last week on tour and yeah, the Strange Mercy erasure is real--we only got "Cheerleader" and "Year of the Tiger," and those clocked at songs 16 and 18 of a 21 song set.
I'd push back a bit on this. I think the general apathy around this cover (which is from all of two people) has far less to do with the sanctimonious hipsterdom than it does the law of diminishing returns. Miley's done enough of these classic rock staple covers during her Plastic Hearts era that I could already hear "And nothing else matterrrrrrrs" in her vibrato-y rasp before pushing play. Does it take away from this being a decently sung cover? Not exactly, but it's hard to muster enthusiasm for a trick I've already seen enough times for her to populate her own cover album at this point.
Showing my age a bit in that I'm impressed this gets 1,600 words in before mentioning Juno, the main way I interacted with this album. Good writeup though!
Didn't have a chance to get all the way through this one earlier, but man, I'd love to have an instrumental of this album. These beats sound great.
I can get Tom's pitch here: We're a decade out from Take Care, an album loaded with flagrant fouls. Is there anything else we expect from Drake, at this point?
(At the same time, it's hard to not feel frustrated/annoyed/disappointed in Aubrey for his arrested adolescence. You look at him against, say, Taylor Swift, the other millennial #feelings superstar, and Taylor has at least in broadstrokes grown up with her fans, while Drake's still enabling his', er, worst behavior.)
I got most of the way through it. Like most Drake albums, it's kind of a slog, but there's a lot of really enjoyable beat/feature work going on, although finding out it has an R.Kelly credit is grounds to not touch parts of this again.
Eh, I can see Tom's point about Kanye and his mom.
Even though I haven't really engaged with contemporary Kanye over the last 5-6 years because of what he's espoused and who he associates with, Kanye's relationship with his mother and what that and her loss have meant to him is a thing that will always hit me directly in my chest when someone calls on it (less so for kind of wack lines or how Kanye invoked her for his presidential campaign). It could be a ton of projection on my part as the only child of a single mom, but stuff like Tom's opening grafs here puts a lump in my throat.
I've listened to every Halsey album exactly once, but they have a few keepers. I liked "Nightmare" and was bummed more of their work didn't go into that vein.
Consider me on-board for this one. I also kinda love the gall to not drop any singles and have this whole thing just show up on Friday.
Sounds real encouraging. I liked "He Said She Said," but yeah, "How Not to Drown" is one of my favorites of the year.
Also, since I dunno where else this would best come up, I've gotten real into that Red Velvet mini-album from last week, they seem like good K-Pop.
Ha, triple pun.
I get that it feels like this album's gonna face the firing squad for crimes beyond itself. It reminds me a lot of Everything Now, where both artists seem to have gone up their asses, the pre-release singles don't inspire a lot of confidence, and there's a general bad vibes air around the rollout and this overall style. I think SP's also probably getting hit with a Lorde backlash (whatever you think of it, the uniformly breathless writing around Melodrama was a lot), and a backlash to this kind of beige, understated, vibes-core pop that's been in vogue for the last year or so. I thought more people were going to come out against Happier Than Ever, but it may be this album that gets that.
I'm not saying that any of it's fair, but this one does seem like a perfect storm to get dunked on.
That's the thing: I think this is biographical. Lorde by all accounts seems to be at a point in life where she isn't the outsider weirdo teen, nor is her heart getting broken in New York, so now she's just a rich bored person who jazzes up her day by hanging at Martha's Vineyard, getting her nails done while high, or smoking up with her friends while one of them stumbles through a tarot reading.
A case study in someone who checks off all the boxes on paper, but just does not have it in practice.
The voice-to-lip-sync here throws me off, too; dude is emoting way too much in the video for such a hushed vocal.
"Oxytocin" is probably my keeper, but yeah, I'm not feeling this one as a whole. Eilish's "whispery, vibesy minimalism" thing only really clicks if you have songs like a motherfucker, and for long stretches, this just feels too staid.
"(Real estate rental and leasing is the main industry in Kaua’i. I Googled.)"
Respect for the motherfucking craft.
After a first listen, I really liked "I Didn't Change My Number," "Oxycontin," and still dig "Therefore I Am." The title track is nice but something about its vibe feels a little off. Promising stuff, though.
As for the rest, none of it's bad by any stretch, and the production values are quite high, but it's not always an engaging listen. It kind of reminds me of like, A Moon Shaped Pool where my takeaway is that this was probably really fulfilling to make and it's technicals are off the charts, but the majority of the finished project (save "True Love Waits" and "Daydreaming" in Radiohead's case) feels a little sterile to me.
Eh, y'know as someone who sat through that entire Machine Gun Kelly album, I'm gonna argue he was the problem there more than Travis Barker was; the new KennyHoopla mixtape and the new Willow album he was involved with are both much better and more artistically sound than Tickets to My Downfall was, and this could be an interesting lark, if nothing else.
Also, I'm not going to go full revisionist on Rebirth but this has held up pretty well. I'd love to hear like, Lil Uzi Vert do something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfYcOYMNuXM
I guess if you look at that record's critical acclaim, it kinda makes sense that artists would go to Antonoff for "that Norman Fucking Rockwell!! touch," which is about the only reason I can think of for his swerve as a producer from Bleachers-lite to fussy classicist.
I was thinking about this in a thread on the popheads subreddit about why people don't like Jack Antonoff, and what bugs me about his current run of production work is that he doesn't seem to challenge whoever he's with. I read a ten year retrospective on The Wonder Years' Suburbia, I've Given You All, and Now I'm Nothing in BrooklynVegan recently, and the band talked about how Dan got pushed enough by their producer that he threw up after doing vocals a few times, and how their drummer ended up losing weight because their producer kept telling him to hit the drums harder.
I think obviously the world doesn't need Jack Antonoff telling Lorde to keep doing vocal takes until her voice really sounds like that, but there's an inherent kind of stakeslessness and lack of urgency to his most recent work. In what feels like every artist profile for their I-worked-with-Jack-Antonoff record, there's inevitably this quote that's like "And working with Jack was such a delight. We met up and just kept writing and recording all day in the studio," and to me, his recent gigs sound for better and worse like the product of friends mucking around without someone saying "Hm, I think you could have come at that differently."
Yooooo, a tenth anni piece for Vacation, let's go.
Definitely agree with Arielle that this record was a departure for BTMI!. I think you see it start on Scrambles, but to me, Vacation is the connective tissue from BTMI!'s earlier, kinda yahoo records to Jeff's more intentional solo albums. It's the album where he lets his ambitions and grandiosity actualize instead of obfuscating them; on an earlier record, "Campaign for a Better Weekend" would have probably hit the panic button midway through and turned into a discordant mix of yells, synths, horns, and diminished chords instead of being outwardly pretty like it is here. And that's not to say that Vacation or later albums lack discordance or the willingness to musically go there, but the way Jeff's gotten more deliberate about his arrangements and not throwing everything at the wall all the time is how we get shit like "Scram!" or "9/10" or the WORRY. medley. This is where you get a sense that Jeff can be that guy.
Also, "Everybody That You Love" is so criminally underrated. That last minute and change is one of the most sublime things I've ever heard.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to write all of this out, it really verbalizes everything about why Halsey (and anyone not cis) gets what's perceived as "too prickly" about their pronouns.
Well, yes, but kind of.
Generally speaking, someone publicly using "she/they" or "he/they" or another mix of two+ pronouns indicates their preference to use a mix of the two when referring to them (as thiscity alluded to above and as I can back up anecdotally, dual pronoun use can also be a "soft opening" for a further exploration of gender ID, like coming out as trans or nonbinary or going to "they/them" full time). For my friends who use two pronouns, I'll be sure to change it up a bit during conversation, especially since for a bunch of reasons, they may not get hit with the "they" all that often, so I want to be supportive.
Admittedly I'm not super sure how exactly you handle that split over an article (do you change every few sentences? every graf? just every now and then?), but if especially if you're doing a cover piece and it goes into Halsey's pronouns, not using both feels sloppy at best and disrespectful at worst.
This seems kinda underwhelming in a way where I can already see the reviews calling this "a vibes album."
Also, I may be wrong, but the "Pretty girls will fade, too" chorus feels kinda "I'm Not Like Other Girls," which I thought was considered gauche nowadays.
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