LogFAQs > #976320991

The Weeknd - House of Balloons > FKA twigs - Magdalene > Frank Ocean - Blonde

I listened to House of Balloons a few years ago as part of Trilogy for one of my music projects and basically hated it... but I've wanted to revisit some of this music for quite a while now and see how I feel now that I've mellowed a bit & am *probably" more receptive to what the album is doing.

1: Decatur
2: Casimir Pulaski Day
3: John Wayne Gacy, Jr.
4: Chicago
5: The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades
6: Concerning the UFO
7: The Seer's Tower
8: The Tallest Man
9: The Man of Metropolis
10: Jacksonville
11: Come On! Feel the Illinoise!
12: Prairie Fire That Wanders About
13: They Are Night Zombies!!
14: To The Workers of
15: The Black Hawk War
16: Out of Egypt

This might be the album I most dreaded covering. I tried listening to it once years ago during one of my music projects and honestly couldn't make it all the way through the album. It's not that I don't like Sufjan Stevens, but his work is a bit... exhausting. There's so much to analyze in his music, lyrically and emotionally, that they tend to demand a high amount of focus & a long period of quiet reflection afterwards. I feel that after I've experienced one of his songs in full that it'll be a few months before I'm ready to tackle another one. Last time I tried this album, I got completely burned out after a couple songs and gave up.

I've done my best to listen to it this time. I've listened to each song five times and made at least a cursory glance at Genius to see what people were saying about the music. And yet, I still feel rather hollow. There's just so much here that, mentally and emotionally, I can't fully process everything. I feel like properly ranking and processing this album would be a year long endeavor & rushing through it in a week is doing a disservice. I've *listened* to the music repeatedly, but I can't say that I've properly experienced it.

Though I'm being far too negative, I should clarify that these are personal problems and not a critique of the album (or the nomination itself). The music itself is fantastic, powerful, unlike anything else we've covered, and I get why it's so popular. It's just... more than I can deal with in any reasonable timeframe, leaving me to rank rather surface level impressions of the music.