#albumblogging

[pirepoumon]

also i was probably way too hard on laugh track as it avoids the worst things about first two pages of frankenstein how ever i stand by my fury at getting preached to about fucking grippy socks in a psych ward by mr "whispering moodily makes the song more serious" berninger and has really given me an awful impression of pheobe bridgers who's also on that track. genuinely fuck off and die with this mental health uwu 101 pretentious bullshit, it's so pathetic and infantilzing and just distills every sin of that album into one maddening (lol) track. i hope i never hear it again

[mtg-player1]

who up making that door less open

[sailorleo]

:33< 413blogging is about to turn into albumblogging

:33< on the furst song and it's already making me cry help

[citriccenobite-deactivated]

wow olive scribe is choice as fuck too

[pirepoumon]

sometimes i am like, perhaps i did simply inherit my opinion that synchronicity by the police is a perfect album, all time great. and then i listen to it in sequence and it is so incredibly good that i have to admit my father is objectively right. it's actually very telling that when i borrowed his record collection (he doesn't have a player rn) he was surprised to be told that he had two plastic-protected copies of it; he didn't remember that. but it's very much the kind of album you could buy twice - just in case, or because you couldn't wait for someone who loaned it to give it back, or so on.

one thing about playing the vinyl is synchronicity i opens - of course - but synchronicity ii actually closes out the A side, which was somehow surprising. s1 is the manic upswing to the niche of songs also occupied by downsinging circle by siouxsie, and it's - well it just began skipping in a circle-like loop on "almost imperceptible, totally inflexible, something inexpressible" as i got to typing this part which is very funny. especially as bookends, i appreciate the - this is the limit of my music vocabulary - but s1 & s2 feel in tune with each other. same key? something to look into.

speaking of niche song topics shared between the police and siouxsie, i fucking love mother. mother by the police 🤝mother/oh mein papa by siouxsie 🤝 mother by mcr. andy summers going nuts is funny, it's just the right amount of discordant, they should have let him do weird shit more.

o my god is an underrated police hit in my heart, especially because it contains the "do i have to tell the story..." lines that previously appeared in every little thing she does is magic, though i prefer this one. walking in yoru footsteps is a smooth transition though so much more subdued; it shares the sort of stoccato percussive feeling but muted from s1. also, my young love of miss gradenko probably explains some shit about my career path.

the back half is crazy because i never remember that every breath you take is from this album; it's really the only one of these songs, depsite it being my favorite of their albums, that is among their Biggest Hits. it's good, but the whole "omg people think it's romantic but it's NOT" bit, while true, is way funnier with it leading us out of side a. king of pain is probably in my top 5 all time police songs, out of nostalgia for latching onto it early into listening to them but it does in fact hold up so well. in retrospect side b is kind of meh otherwise, but that's only by comparison to my love of what precedes it. and tea in the sahara is a nice note to end on.

if there's weaknesses here i think it's that the interesting critiques of family structure and political theater's absence in the B side makes their hollowness more apparent, but also, albums relased by big bands on big labels are simply not effective vehicles of social change, so it's fine. i might have to judge it harsher if it was trying to be that, and it's not, and anyway i can go back to ghost in the machine and listen to rehumanize yourself if i want something punchier. synchronicity is a perfectly weird, tightly wound and edited record and it's nice to see something live up to and even exceed my memory of it.

[pirepoumon]

today's albums: dr dog's newest, then enter the wu-tang, wu-tang meets the indie culture, wu-tang forever, iron flag, and the w all by the wu-tang clan (obviously). dr dog's self-titled was fine but didn't get to me like critical equation did, so i started going thru tracks i've saved but whose artists i haven't heard much else of - and protect ya neck is great, so wu-tang it was.

i really have a lot of work to do in terms of hip hop & rap knowledge, but on first impressions i really do love the film stylings and voiceover clips integrated in almost every album i tried today. the voltron reference i think hit a little different in the 90s, but i also caught a terrordome reference which rules because public enemy's outstanding welcome ii the terrordome is what piqued my interest in 90s rap. talk about a perfect album!

enter the wu-tang is easily my favorite; it's immediately clear why it's regarded so highly, it's playful and serious and deft. i always thought the radio call in intro to protect ya neck was fun, but it's amazing to find that it's in the context of a debut album proved right. finding some good critiques/reviews of it on my to do list and especially anything about that riff that gets repeated and reinterpreted across a bunch of songs (including on some of the later albums?) which i don't have either the genre or general music knowledge to articulate or pin down.

indie culture was interesting as a show of skill in multiple genres, but it and the others i listened to today didn't have the energy that's so captivating about enter the wu-tang. i might appreciate them more when my ear is better, and with a little more dedicated listening, but (excepting the one song with the r word in the chorus) i didn't dislike anything in particular about them and am glad i tried them out.

[pirepoumon]

spent today going thru the entirety of depeche mode's catalog (save already beloved Delta Machine & spirit which i already know exactly how i hate it) and am now resuming my tour of my less-visited REM albums. it's really funny because these and the national are among my favorite bands but my feelings on their total catalogues are really wildly different.

depeche mode is beloved and while today proves I actually do like their albums-as-units better than i thought it's predominately individual tracks that make me go crazy, because that's what my mom played and what was in my dad's painstakingly ripped mp3 collection when i was teenager. but it's also extremely rare for an album to have total duds.

they're no REM though, a band with far more songs i actively dislike, but whose albums make me feel a little rabid. i'm an automatic for the people AND an out of time contrarian (fables my #1 for ever! reckoning > oot! monster an easy top 3!) but i still don't think there's a single DM opening track that lights my whole body up the way even Drive does. and that's leagues down from Feeling Gravitys Pull!

[pirepoumon]

today's albums have been dirty computer by janelle monáe & critical equation by dr. dog. i ended up cleaning my bathroom during swathes of dirty computer so i'm not exactly counting it, but critical equation is totally new to me and i love it. both have me thinking about a good album is, as someone who feels woefully under-vocabularied about good music.

for example every avenue's self-titled album is a classic example of a perfect album of largely mediocre music; it defines its own shape with an exacting vision and has a range inside of the house the songs all live in, some clear evocation that delights as a unit. (pop punk is rife with this, imo.)

neither dirty computer or critical equation are like that, but even as i'm now looping dr. dog's true love (easy new favorite) because the individual songs do hit hard, the frontmost delight sparking my brain is the cohesion that holds surprises, the way they both feel like an experience to me and make me think about the making of them, the choices, the vision and whether it compares to my own subjective encounter with it. i admit to being influenced by album covers when the image of an album gets painted over my memories but i don't think resonance is required - every avenue's pop pink sure doesn't, but the album-as-a-whole is permeated with those colors because the album's sound has identity, and my mind's visuals conjures not my own experiences first but the tangible object of album cover when i think of that cohesion.

[mtg-player1]

I feel so bad but so good

I'm sure CSH can fix this

[pirepoumon]

sorry to ms bridgers as it was actually the following track "send for me" that gave me a conniption but in my defense i might not have blacked out in rage at this precise line if i hadn't just been preached to abt Please Notice Your'e Mentally Ill by the fucking ballerina on the table cock in hand son of a bitch

also i was probably way too hard on laugh track as it avoids the worst things about first two pages of frankenstein how ever i stand by my fury at getting preached to about fucking grippy socks in a psych ward by mr "whispering moodily makes the song more serious" berninger and has really given me an awful impression of pheobe bridgers who's also on that track. genuinely fuck off and die with this mental health uwu 101 pretentious bullshit, it's so pathetic and infantilzing and just distills every sin of that album into one maddening (lol) track. i hope i never hear it again