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| Topic | Recommend two albums. I'll rate, rank and review them. |
| thundersheep 09/27/17 7:14:31 PM #92: | NBIceman posted... So, since Owl didn't include a 2017 album and got skipped and I don't want TDH to go unrepresented, can I make a change? Yeah that sounds fair. That's actually one of the artists I was most excited to get into. Queens of the Stone Age - Villains It's on albums like this I think about how different a topic this would be if I never suggested doing two of these a day or having any schedule really, and just decided to talk about the music when I had something to say. The difference in opinion between one listen and 4 listens can be huge. If those 4 listens are spread out over a period of days or weeks, it's literally night and day. I guess I prioritized hearing a bunch of new music over putting together meaningful critique... but I do think about changing the format every now and then. So, for whatever reason, I was hyped for this album. I'd never listened to a QotSA album before, and I picked up Songs for the Deaf in the weeks before this was released in order to confirm my hype? I don't know. It was something about the name and the cover that had me excited. I didn't even bother checking out the pre-release single. I got the album on Thursday night and was immediately hooked. I was expecting some kind of dance-rock, and again I don't know how or why I was expecting anything when I hadn't read anything about the album, and Songs for the Deaf came out 15 years ago. Imagine my elation when "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" had a great groove and "The Way You Used To Do" was a straight up bop. I mean it's not even the typical rock headbang/nod vibe you get from that track.. It's seriously danceable and I love it. I thought the whole album would be filled with tracks like that, but the dance vibe left as quickly as it came and I ended up severely disappointed with the album as a whole. Now if I were "reviewing" it that same night, I would have said it's bad/boring/disappointing and that would be it. Luckily, I wasn't. So I went back to it a couple times and still, huge drop-off after the first two tracks. But on my listens today, something changed. I still think the third track is bad, but the album itself is kind of great. It's 48 minutes spread between 9 tracks and only two of them ("Domesticated Animals" and "Head Like a Haunted House") are not to my tastes. The rest of the group features some really interesting instrumentation and the length afforded to every track gives each song space to really stretch its legs. Nothing feels rushed, they're not trying to cram in a few verses and hooks in a 3.5 minute package for radio and I think most of the songs are much stronger for it. On tracks like "Fortress" and "Un-Reborn Again" the electronics are just allowed to morph and twist, creating their own vibe before the traditional instruments even make an appearance and they're able to form very distinct settings for many songs throughout the album by taking this approach. I don't know if I'm making sense, but it's really fucking cool. This album is really fucking cool. Final Rating: More fucks/10 --- ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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