Which is the best Junior Boys album?: Last Exit (2004) vs. So This Is Goodbye (2006)

Last Exit easily crushes So This Is Goodbye but they're both great albums.

love both but last exist, easily

thirded.

So This Is Goodbye

This is tough, Last Exit is one of the best synthpop albums of the decade but the song "FM" means so damn much to me

last exit but they're both so good

last exit has this creepy stalker vibe that gives it a lot more mystique and was mostly swapped out for additional romanticism on so this is goodbye

Last Exit clearly has something that none of the subsequent albums have, it's the Johnny Dark influence, the willingness to use rhythm as an emotive tool in its own right.

it's hard to even put into words how much Last Exit meant/means to me - I don't think anything else they were going to do really could have competed with it, because I came into Last Exit without expectations. I had heard it was really good. So This Is Goodbye is an album the The Band That Made Last Exit. It's great, but it did not change my life in that reorienting-you-emotionally way that Last Exit did.

Lovely tour as well.

Rest well nick.K

I think the reason this a toss up for me is that I wasn't exposed to JB until 2006, when So This Is Goodbye came out (I was knee deep in school books during the first half of the decade, so I missed out on a lot until I finished). I had just moved to Portland at the time and was living in a sleek new high rise along the river. The soft, meticulously arranged, bubbly synth textures of STIG fit perfectly in my new setting of well-crafted new construction among the endless sea of trees that is Portland.

Taken in reverse order, STIG sounded like JB honing their sound and coming up with a near perfect synth pop album that rivaled any of its 80s forbears. Last Exit, don't get me wrong, is exquisite. The production is looser, more varied, more unpredictable, and it certainly broke more ground than its successor. And to these ears, probably nothing in their entire catalog equals the sublimity of the title track. But to me, some of its rhythmic gymnastics sound just slightly superfluous (as if Johnny Dark weren't completely confident in the songs' ability to stand on their own). STIG just kind of cuts to the bone of the sound/emotional location that I think they were aiming for in the first place.

http://www.urbancondospaces.com/files/2011/01/One_Lincoln_Loft_View.jpg

*puts So This Is Goodbye on the hi-fi*
*climbs up ladder to settee*

ha, exactly

STIG just kind of cuts to the bone of the sound/emotional location that I think they were aiming for in the first place.

I kind of think it cuts to the bone of what one of the duo working on those tracks was doing, sure.

haha

MH - I sort of agreed until I thought about it; now I'm actually not sure of which half of the duo you speak (?) I think there's enough continuity between the two albums that there's no dramatic departure. Yes, there's a noticeable difference in production (the Matt Didemus influence is felt); but both sound like JB records. I was kind of surprised when I realized that Jeremy Greenspan has more command of the duo's sound than I'd realized (for further support of this claim, see Johnny Dark's uneven Stereo Image project). I'm not a big fan of Greenspan's vocals, but I've come to appreciate his less obvious contributions to their sound.

I see their progression somewhat analogous to that of Depeche Mode. Vince Clark had/has a very distinctive sound that is easy to spot in each of his bands. I do love Speak & Spell (even if the following year's Upstairs at Eric's blows it out of the water). But I now consider DP's subsequent 80s albums + Violator as more definitive of their sound.

It's not to say that I think So This Is Goodbye is necessarily the better album, but I associate it as being closer to the Junior Boys' intended aesthetic.

I have a hard time placing one album over the other, but then again I at least like every JBs record.

Both these albums are perfect but So This Is Goodbye just has the edge for me. FM is one of my favourite songs ever.

The half of the duo... that was still in the band when that album was recorded? Most of Last Exit is JD + JG collaborating, with the exception of a couple tracks that are mostly JG w/some MD input.

"Intended aesthetic" only works if you think of Junior Boys as Jeremy Greenspan plus a collaborator, which is basically how the first album is credited -- "Jeremy Greenspan with Johnny Dark and Matt Didemus." The later work is just credited to "Junior Boys," which at that point is Greenspan and Didemus, although in interviews Didemus kind of downplayed his role initially, if I remember correctly.

The thing with ilx is that a lot of us listened to (overly many times) that first album, and in fact the material that was released before it. Both singles were Greenspan + Dark, so that's kind of a valid interpretation of who "Junior Boys" really was at that point. So when you say something about the sound "they" were aiming for... you're talking about two different "theys!"

fwiw, Stereo Image was ehhh but the Johnny Dark EP was good and one of the tracks was the JB remix that was originally in the promo material floating around on the net before the first album was released.

Yeah my first exposure to Junior Boys was the 2002 promo EP which was massive for me at the time, and if anything was slightly more Dark than Greenspan - not just the amazing "High Come Down" remix but also two basically instrumental 2-step tunes which never appeared again (actually I bet if I listen to these again now they will seem really post-dubstep).

Ironically at the time I thought that the promo went slightly too far in that direction - those 2 tunes were probably the weakest, though conversely the remix of "High Come Down" was possibly the best thing there.

Although it should be stressed as well that Greenspan seemed to be really into 2-step/proto-dubstep etc. as well, I remember his shortlived blog massively (over)praising the first Dubstep Allstars mix.

Did you listen to the JD ep, Tim? I think I had the random tracks somewhere, but it seemed like that ep was actually several of them.

All good points, MH. I suppose I'm referring to the entire Junior Boys oeuvre. I addressed the chronology issue already, so I get what you're saying about Last Exit being the foundation for their sound. I suppose I'm looking at it more from an historian's perspective and considering all of their output until now.

To draw another (more arbitrary) comparison, let's take the director Stanley Kubrick. Looking back now, I suspect more people would say that Full Metal Jacket (1987) is a more 'Kubrickian' war film than Paths of Glory (1957) - regardless of preference - despite the earlier film being more foundational to his artistic development. The same could obviously be said of many musical artists.

When I look back at all of JB's work, I think STIG might just edge out LE as the more definitive album. But again, that's not to say it's necessarily the better album.

I'm rambling. I need to eat...

Yeah I have it somewhere.

It's good but I still though the HCD remix was the best thing on there.

Begone Dull Care is my favourite. they never wrote a better song than The Animator imo.

I'm not saying Last Exit is the foundation for anything! I'm saying my perceptions are colored by it and it's really an album by a group with different aims.

When I think "Junior Boys" I think, hmm, I like that band. Then I get wistful, think back a few years, and think of this:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/899741/pictures/jbs.jpg

(rip nick kilroy!)

Fair enough. I just think the aims of the group didn't so much markedly change as they fleshed out a bit. Unfortunately, I don't think the subsequent two albums - while good- haven't lived up to those aims.

to be fair, the first tour was matt didemus looking bored while hitting chords on the keyboard and smoking a cigarette. it was the last year or two before most places outlawed smoking indoors, though

last exit has this creepy stalker vibe that gives it a lot more mystique and was mostly swapped out for additional romanticism on so this is goodbye

yeah, that feeling of an idling car on a frozen street with something worrying in the trunk, the skittery winterishness of last exit: that is the thing that i love best and most complicatedly. a year or so ago i saw junior boys with a drunk friend and we danced to them as cheery synthpop and it was wonderful but it was a thousand miles from hearing the same warm sounds hanging uneasily in 'birthday'.

Pretty sure I heard STIG first and it's a good album but Last Exit is near-perfect, I don't know if it's because the arrangements are stronger or what but it definitely sounds like they knew exactly what they were doing.

c sharp major OTFM

i wonder what Dark is doing?

do they do superloud shoegaze guitar on any of the post-STIG songs live, like they do on the back half of 'last exit'?

that just reminded me there's a fennesz mix of last exit (song, not album)! off to headphones land I go

Aaand it turns out I have the 2002 unreleased ep thing on my other computer. It was six songs, including that remix and two unreleased ones, right?

that fennesz remix is one of the best things any of them has been involved in

all of their records is great

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Last Exit easily crushes So This Is Goodbye but they're both great albums.
― brotherlovesdub

That about sums things up.

https://thequietus.com/articles/27172-tom-fleming-wild-beasts-one-true-pairing-bakers-dozen-favourite-albums?fbclid=IwAR0yAmhsktV7w2UoGm5VVW5U781WzutT8KZN8xkMIOZYZ0dSdkzMiVS95zo&page=11

A huge influence upon Wild Beasts, it turns out;

No Junior Boys, no Two Dancers. .. Laurence Bell gave us the record and said ‘I think you boys will like this’ – and it was like, ‘Yeah, okay, we’ll listen to that and make you another record that sounds a bit like it.’ This one in particular has lots of sad, sexy songs, and it was a way into the synthetic thing for me, because I’d come from a background of playing instruments and didn’t know one end of a computer from another, but I got this. It’s got all the austerity of techno, in the service of these very sexy love songs written by two awkward guys from Canada..

Their lyrics resonated with me. It didn’t feel like an energetic record, but like a sad one, as if you’re dancing despite the sadness, and there’s this late-night bed-hopping despair to it which is fucking awesome. It’s sexy and there’s a consistent melancholy that gets to you, but also with lots of big hooks and great choruses. They should have been massive; they should be massive. I would say they were one of our greatest shared influences, and led us down an avenue away from [Wild Beasts’ debut] Limbo, Panto, that scattergun indie thing, into something sleeker.