thread to dis hyped releases that you don't get/don't like/wanna complain about

RIGHT

let's liveblog this

fair warning: this isn't going to go well

opening track legitimately v good, there was one bit that felt ripped off from Dominique Leone of this parish but yeah can't complain, melodies and structure striking and on point

second track, that you're all seemingly gaga about, is nothing the Fiery Furnaces haven't done so much better

3: annoying even before the completely artless kate bush reference

4: starting to work out what my problem with this is. it's the whole cabaret jazz-singing lolrandom wackiness. not that she's Amanda Palmer but it isn't a million miles off. the homemade percussion is a bit lolrandom too - it'd be better if the instruments were being used to do something more interesting compositionally, but the arrangements themselves appear to be the interest factor. bring back that opening track ffs

5: *insert clapping emoji between every word*

oh god is this still going

6: well, this is one of the catchiest ones so far at least, although it contains some of the most irritating Winehouse-isms yet, and the lyrics are far too...sassy? cutesy? precious? yeah i know i must sound like an asshole rn given the actually-serious themes of male badness and suffering hinted at throughout the album but this is an album people are describing as an experimental leap-forward for art-pop and so i have to counter that canard as fervently as is required, them's the rules, soz

7: this is sounding much more like it - there's something going on musically that's a bit more substantial this time. less energy spent on flexing all the jazzy vocal mannerisms and more on building a narrative and a momentum. the first track since the opener that i've really liked. nice use of backing vocals and the homemade percussion works well

8: *insert clapping emoji between every word*

we def needed more soft-liberal npr mithering in our lives eh right. the music is dull as hell too - sheer upright-bass pablum

9: there's a cool vocal harmony in the chorus, not getting the transcendence tho. yeah she's still hitting her cutlery drawer and that's cool w/e

10: the lyrics in the chorus are making me cringe! i do not get what people are hearing in this to go 'omg these lyrics are the best', it's all so sickly and bad-twee! it's all signifiers without substance! apparently she is worth $14 million and this track feels like a good place to mention this idk. at least she's mostly dialled-back the vocal jazz hands. oh except that semi-whispered thing near the end puts my fucking teeth on edge

11: *clapping emoji between every word* fgti's tune-yards (sorry, I mean tUnE-YaRdS!1!!1!) comparison getting truer with each song. oh it doubled tempo, give the album 10.0!!

ah this is the track where she talks about that. ok fine. men are bastards, we knew this tho

12: the vocal harmonies are just irritating here, but i guess that's cabaret. i guess cabaret is the best music now. ffs.

13: finally doing away with melodies entirely, pointing towards a bright future where all music is just tweets

IN SUMMARY

a generous 5/10 for 'i want you to love me' and 'newspapers' alone, the rest is bilge

please only reply if ur sympathetic to my cause

ty

lol I was waiting for this. Agreed, for the most part (am too lazy to explain why right now). The Idler Wheel remains her best album.

yeah sorry, but what the fuck

also, given the thread revival, i have to add Thundercat to the list.
i have tried several times with each of his albums.
do. not. get. it.

Tl;dr: too many words, and Broadway ruins everything.

oh i can't stand most of thundercat's records mark e, i'm with you there xp

i'm gonna spend the rest of my day being mad at the complete meaninglessness of the phrase "sheer upright-bass pablum"

if you don't want to actually hear the record then don't listen to it

what the fuck i love thundercat

lol i don't really

but idk that phrase was meant to capture the kind of soft-jazz ennui i experienced listening to that song, game of opinions innit. i'm still the heel sometimes yknow

gregg_joker.gif

Brad, this thread is your Achilles’ heel, I’d avoid us negative folk when we’re in the mood for a bitchin’ if I were you.

also when Ladies started I was as receptive as I was at any point during the listen-through (which I did absent of any other activity) as the best song on the album had just occurred

albeit the opening vocal dampened my anticipation slightly

a liveblog where anything that occurs in the music that's beyond your limited horizons can be dismissed outright as "winehouse-isms" "clapping emoji" "tweets": it's so obvious that these are your projections and you're incapable of hearing beyond them

listen, i *always* get mad when people who supposedly love music can't listen to it

maybe my mistake was to listen too intently - this might have worked better in the background

No such thing as love without hate amirite.

i'd usually not give this record much thought and would even speak approvingly when 'newspaper' appeared in the EOY traxpoll (although at this rate the whole damn album will) but i will never not stand up against the pitchfork-industrial complex

Apparently I've never been tempted to click on the thread about this. Good instinct?

it is a very positive thread without any dissent so in that regard it is a place of health and cheer, this was the wrong thread to click lol

nothing the Fiery Furnaces haven't done so much better

The Furnaces are an interesting comparison point for this album — particularly I’m Going Away (which, in the spirit of this thread, I find more appealing in both songwriting and performance... but that’s a matter of taste, of course).

I wasn't going to check this LP out but now I am, thanks lj.

any record lj goes out of his way to hate on is a record i feel like i need to hear

i like some of the albums that he likes but i _really_ like a lot of the records he loudly and mean-spiritedly dunks on

when the pawn is so so much better than this and i'm probably never gonna listen to the new one again. but am happy that a few ilxors love it so much, good luck to em. liked the new laura marling better as well tbh.

not heard the FA yet but my god the fact that anyone likes Thundercat at all is a testament to the range and diversity of human life and taste in this univese

Thundercat and tune-yards have both made brilliant music, can I use this thread to dis this thread which I don't get/don't like/wanna complain about?

dissing is a relay sport

I understand why Thundercat can be hard to take - his songs never sound finished to me, and his lyrics are sometimes the wrong kind of dumb/quotidian - but if you like '70s funk and fusion (Bootsy Collins solo albums, Slave, George Duke) there's enough there to enjoy.

I like Thundercat, but his music, as well as music that features him like Flying Lotus, tends to start sounding very samey very quickly.

I really like the new Fiona Apple album and I think there are dozens of other albums over the past five years that are as good as it and wished they'd all gotten as close a listen as this one has. Idler Wheel is better by a country mile, production-wise, so much more space and interest, but Bolt Cutters has got so many great zingers that I can't help but love it

Apple has always had one little toe dipped in the dirty sink of cabaret but it's in the harmonic choices, not the affect, and it's never bothered me in the least

And when I listen to Thundercat I feel like I'm enjoying Zappa the way other people have enjoyed Zappa and I've never myself been able to

people who think any woman making art on her own terms = "Kate Bush" are a big part of why I can't stand Kate fucking Bush

i only mentioned kate bush because in the title track of this album she goes on about 'running up that hill' very blatantly, and then a dog barks

the Pitchfork review also mentions Kate Bush

Speaking of which — one more point about the Fiery Furnaces is that P-fork slapped down Rehearsing My Choir with a 4.0 and a pan review; while this one garnered a 10.0 and “No music has ever sounded quite like it” (...although apparently the Slits, Yoko Ono, Meredith Monk, and Steve Reich have come close, according to the review).

None of this is the album’s or the artist’s fault, but it’s the albatross that a “hyped release” has to bear, I guess.

i used to dabble in backlash myself but i have gotten very tired of it over the years. i often hear people complaining about a record when what they are really complaining about is the relative popularity of that record. there are times and places this sort of complaint is appropriate - i wasn't there, but i feel like i broadly agree with people in the '50s who were disappointed that pat boone got more chart action than little richard - but how is it fair or helpful to shit talk fiona apple because pitchfork rated her record higher than the latest fiery furnaces record? even granting that pitchfork's editorial ratings are grossly unfair and arbitrary, i don't see how it's of any more benefit than claiming that "outdoor miner" is a shit song because the record company used payola to promote it.

I’m more just making an observation about “hyped releases”... if I’m shot-taking anything, it’s more Pfork than the album.

It does seem like the uniqueness of the approach to percussion on the album is being overstated and over-celebrated as if y'all didn't join in on dunking on like, Tilly and the Wall. Different times I guess.

This release has definitely triggered my tendency towards aggressive knee-jerk contrarianism when I feel as though I'm left out of something and not really getting it, so I'll try to be restrained and just say that there's just not a lot about this music that does it for me. There are small moments of melody or lyricism where I feel "ooh, I quite like that", but they either then go for too long, or not long enough to make them turn into a satisfying song. Some tracks sound like they came together after a bunch of sing-song melodies were captured in Voice Memos and then shoehorned into one song together. I can see why this messy/stitches showing approach might have appeal for some, but it just hits me as ineffective songwriting.

I don't really give a shit what Pitchfork thinks. My view on Fiona Apple is that she has a thing that she does and she does it very well, but it's just not the thing I like to spend a lot of time listening to, with the exception of "Ladies" and maybe a few other tracks. I'll just go and listen to the new The Garden album again (6.4 on Pitchfork).

Full disclosure: I’ve never really “gotten” Tom Waits either, who seems to me one of Apple’s spiritual forebears.

disappointed in this revival -- in my FB feed, people are being accused of having bad politics if they don't freak completely out about Bolt Cutters. nag more plz

"It's not even the best homemade album by a long-standing American indie singer-songwriter released in the last ten days!"

idk I mean I really *don't* hate the music, and as I said, I thought two of the songs were great. framed only slightly differently I'd be focusing on the positives (those two songs), but it is so damnably easy to be drawn into the heightened Narrative, or at least, make the Narrative the issue, even above the Art. while I said some mean things about Apple, these are all personal aesthetic differences and I'd certainly not want to deny her her truth and her expression, nor be so arrogant as to suggest how she should be. but my vitriol & momentum is aimed, not even so much at the fans who love the album, but at those who have proclaimed together as one that music as a competition is over for now - not so much on ILM either but across the internet

& maybe I do view music as a competition myself too much. it is so easy to do and such a trap

This tweet was kind of a positive (because Powers is almost always positive, something I like sometimes and hate others) gloss on my initial skepticism:

To all loving the brilliant new Fiona Apple album #FetchTheBoltCutters: I'm excited for you if you don't know out jazz or new classical music, there's a whole world for you to discover that's redolent of what you're loving, not to mention Afro-Cuban and Afro-Haitian rhythms

— Feeling Distant (@annkpowers) April 17, 2020

When I actually listened to the record, though, I was won over by it on its own merits and stopped giving a shit whether the people raving about it had heard all the music I'd heard that caused it to resonate for me.

Is that whole world redolent of the lyrics and the singing and the melodies too, or just the rhythms/percussion? Because that’s just one piece of Bolt Cutters’ appeal imho

is powers subtweeting that p4k 'no music has ever sounded like this' review?

kind of a passive-aggressive tweet, lol

tweeting is a relay sport

i have twitter blocked on my computer and therefore in my head the "powers" y'all are talking about is the renegade doctor with some interesting and novel ideas about hormone replacement therapy

please don't spoil the illusion by correcting me

It’s Kenny powers actually. And you’re fucking out.

i don't even know what that means!

It’s Kenny powers actually. And you’re fucking out.