Where are your polls tonight: Sound of Silver vs. This Is Happening

Sound Of Silver hit really hard very quickly, and felt very epochal. Big emotional payoff. This Is Happening merely felt "very good" initially, but I suspect I probably like them about them same amount now - a couple of awesome peaks on each one that eclipse everything else, and the rest is very aesthetically pleasing / button pushing without being stellar.

epochal is the right word for it.

sound of silver, not even close

this is happening

never liked This Is Happening and it's also worse than their first record,so Silver,of course

There should be an option to like them both equally because I think I do.

sound of silver or gtfo. this is happening is terrible.

I love them both but listen to TIH more often, despite being the inferior album.

SoS pretty easily

it confuses me that someone could love SoS and say TIH is terrible

mm.

Jams still had some new ideas when he put out SoS

This Is Happening. Don't even own Sound Of Silver anymore.

couldn't pick between the two now, though I really felt the 'epoch' vibe of SoS so that one.

it confuses me that someone could love SoS and say TIH is terrible

exactly, they're really very similar. I feel like SoS is going to win in a landslide here but for me it was pretty close. That stretch of North American Scum/Someone Great/All My Friends/Us v. Them is so good that I can't vote against it. Also, I kinda get that Murphy wasn't really innovating or even trying to head in new directions on his last album - everything felt like "okay, so this is the new that", over and over. Which almost every artist does anyway. But still. SoS all the way

i sorta think the run that goes "All I Want" "I Can Change" "You Wanted a Hit" "Pow Pow" is as good a run as that one, even though there's nothing as mindblowingly good as Someone Great on TiH.

"Home" is.

mm..

"Dance Yrself Clean" vs "Get Innocuous": Happening
"Drunk Girls" vs "Time To Get Away": Happening
"One Touch" vs "North American Scum": Happening
"All I Want" vs "Someone Great": Silver
"I Can Change" vs "All My Friends": Silver
"You Wanted A Hit" vs "Us vs Them": Silver
"Pow Pow" vs "Watch The Tapes": Silver
"Somebody's Calling Me" vs "Sound Of Silver": Silver
"Home" vs "NY I Love You": Happening

close, but the races Happening wins are tighter than the ones Silver wins, and the worst song on Happening ("Calling Me") is far longer and more awkwardly placed on the album than the worst song on Silver ("NY I Love You"). Plus Silver deals with LCD's Big Theme - mortality - more coherently than Happening does.

Yeah, Home is pretty damn amazing. If it had been on SoS it'd have been as lauded as Someone Great and All My Friends.

"Home" is fantastic. my favourite LCD song (followed by "All my friends").
I'm not a big fan overall but I prefer Happening to Silver.

Silver wins every single one of those head to head matchups even for the ones I don't like that much

"all i want" is my favorite song on either of these. i'm an indie dweeb

prefer happening to silver to s/t, prefer 45:33 by many many leagues to all of the above, give me one song from silver ('all my friends') and happening ('home') and i could live w/ just 45:33 and 'losing my edge'/'beat connection'/'yeah'.

Jams still had some new ideas when he put out SoS - this dude had some good ideas, but i'm not sure he ever had new ideas

good, new, whatever. that last record is a fucking void.

ideas don't have to be new

"new" wasn't really the emphasis there anyway.

I meant new to him, rather than new to the entire universe

fair play. i think there's a certain element to Happening where murphy went "ok let's try to perfect the templates i established on the last record' which emphasized certain parts ('home' seemed a template for a lot of Happening etc), which i don't think is that different from a lot of artists

of course in most cases he had already 'perfected' them i know

yeah, i just hear them as weak sauce versions of templates he had already established

seems like reactions to the record depend on peoples' love for 'all my friends' and their desire/nondesire to hear a record that took that as its foundation

I like LCD more for their dance jams than their new wavey stuff.

If he'd used "Get Innocuous" as the foundation for TIH, I'd probably love it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Both albums are very hit/miss with me, but I'll go with Silver simply for "All My Friends" - One of my all-time favorite songs.

Or rennavate otm, either one.

I don't get how someone could like this band and not like 'dance yrself clean'

This is Happening. The opener and closer on the album are maybe my two favorite LCD songs and they just code kind of Important to me.

"dance yourself clean" is very good but it's a bit too long before the drums kick in. but once they do, wow !

"Dance Yrself Clean" vs "Get Innocuous": Happening

this is insane

the best part of Dance Yrself is how long they make you wait before the drums come in. see it live and ye shall understand

oh I totally get the idea and efficiency of the very long intro and don't dislike it at all. it's just that it being so long I don't really want to listen to the song as often as I could !

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

correct

a harsher beatdown than i expected

That's about what I expected; although I said I like them about the same now, when / if forced to choose, I'd go for SoS for the emotional impact / significance it had at the time, which TiH never stood a chance of equaling.