Board 8 > Rank the Tracks Week 81: Sigrid - Sucker Punch (+ La Dispute results)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Previous results can be seen here:
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Rank_the_Tracks

The rules:
1. Listen to the album in full
2. Rank every track on the album
3. For the results, there will be a curve at the top of each list; two additional points between #1 and #2, and one additional point for the next two ranks. This way, the songs that really stick out to someone get an edge that is not immediately negated by someone else putting it lower. In the case of Demon Days, someone's 15th track will get 1 point, 14th 2 points, 4th 12 points, 3rd 14 points, 2nd 16 points, and 1st 19 points. For albums with greater than 15 tracks, everything ranked below #15 will be given 0 points and the scale for the top 15 will be the same as a 15-track album. For albums with more than 20 tracks, you only have to list your top 15 (with 16-20, I still like having the average rank listed)
4. If you want to include comments for individual songs, I will compile them in the results
5. The results will be posted at the beginning of the next topic
6. The deadline to vote is Sunday, September 25 at 8:00 AM EST - though if you are for whatever reason listening to the album around that time, just say so in the topic and I can delay a bit
7. You can sign up to be added to the user cycle - the next person on the list will choose 3 albums which the other users will vote on for the next topic.
7a. To ensure people are being given an actual choice, the three nominated albums must be by different artists. You can otherwise stick to a similar sound or era.
7b. The tiebreaker for these polls will be whichever is listed first in the poll options - make sure to deliver the results in order of your own preference (which will hopefully have the added benefit of influencing people toward your first choice if they can't decide).
7c. I have added a tiered vote structure - the least popular album will be removed and its backup votes distributed to the other two entrants.
8. The Acclaimed Music Bot will take the top album from the three highest ranked artists on Acclaimed Music who have not yet appeared. On the week before, people can argue for an alternative album by those three artists.

Sigrid - Sucker Punch track list:
1. Sucker Punch
2. Mine Right Now
3. Basic
4. Strangers
5. Don't Feel Like Crying
6. Level Up
7. Sight of You
8. In Vain
9. Don't Kill My Vibe
10. Business Dinners
11. Never Mine
12. Dynamite

User Cycle:
9/25: firefdr (Backstreet Boys - Millennium)
10/02: Johnbobb (Slipknot - Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses)
10/09: VeryInsane
10/16: FoolFantastic
10/23: Seanchan
10/30: Giggsalot
11/06: RyoCaliente
11/13: darkx
11/20: neonreaper
11/27: Great_Paul
12/04: jcgamer107
12/11: ChichiriMuyo
12/18: BlueCrystalTear
12/25: MetalmindStats
1/1: Acclaimed Music Bot
1/8: HBJDubs
1/15: Raetsel_Lapin
1/22: Steiner
1/29: Snake5555555555
2/5: Jesse_Custer
2/12: ZaziGuado

La Dispute - Rooms of the House results

The participants sorted by deviation from final results:
Snake5555555555 (14)
Johnbobb (16)
FoolFantastic (18)
Raetsel_Lapin (27)
MetalmindStats (31)
Seanchan (35)
HBJDubs (38)

General Album Comments

Snake5555555555: This album absolutely wrecks me every listen. It's an album that manages to feel raw and off-the-cuff, like someone writing in a journal about their disparate memories decades after the fact, recollecting trauma and emotion in a euphoric manner, yet make no mistake, every note and strained lyric is exactly where it's meant to be, as La Dispute weaves together an impressive narrative of widespread tragedy, personal heartbreak, and the mundanities of daily life that keep the world spinning. Much like the events portrayed in the album, La Dispute bounces between the soft sounds of a daydream memory and the death-curdling racket of nightmarish pain, such as the case with the punctuated drums and delicate words of Dreyer on "Woman (reading)" giving way to an outpouring of recollection, with the same instrumentals there now more distorted and scratched as if Dreyer's memories were twisted and corrupted in some way. I use this example because I think that track captures this album's tones and messages perfectly. It's a centerpiece that perfectly captures those slow days that always meant the most to you but can never get back. Tiny dots on an endless timeline.

The album opens with "Hudsonville, MI 1956", a track that unfolds like a lurid horror novel. It depicts a recently married husband and wife taking separate trips as a tornado tears through the titular town. Dreyer's lyrics are what nightmares are made of, chock full of intense detail, veering wildly from mundane distractions like building a bookshelf to the grotesquery a woman and her unborn child being thrown into a barbed wire fence. The punctuated vocals, guitars and drums become increasingly more choppy and broken up, the desperation increasing, ands the lyrics have a double effect of signaling the very collapse of the husband and wife's union and fading passion which then unfolds out in the rest of the album's winding and spiraling narrative. The album rewards close attention as every track here calls back or forward to another in some way. There are album tracks here that are actually fully capped (HUDSONVILLE, HIGHWAYS, & CHILD) to signal where they take place which is just such a cool detail, but it's also important because this storyline runs parallel to Dreyer's own experiences with the same thing - as history repeats itself in the worst of ways. Instead of a tornado, it's a bridge collapse, and much like Dreyer's own family history he experiences the same strife and separation. Dreyer's personal tracks often tend to highlight real life as the tragedies take place in the background, such as the absolutely amazing "Stay Happy There", a near unstoppable hardcore onslaught that feels like the most terrifying argument your parents never had as details such as scouring a kitchen for a knife or coffee boiling on the stove feel as huge to an individual as a bridge collapse causing pain and horror to countless individuals. It might feel in bad taste to say that anywhere else, but the way the guitars and Dreyer screams everything out makes you believe it too.

Rooms of the House has moved me to tears and has made me rethink life in ways I never thought possible, and has been a constant present in my life ever since I heard back in 2016. Honestly my favorite track can be something different every time. Like, I think "The Child We Lost 1963" is the most lyrically proficient song on the whole album, but it's so fucking hard to listen to sometimes that I just gravitate towards other tracks sometimes. Or "Objects in Space", a spoken word entry that caps off the album, an epilogue to everything that's at once an emotional goodbye to a past life and a fresh step towards something better. Retroactively, I actually compare this album to The Caretaker's Everywhere at the End of Time. Though about different subjects, that ebb and flow of memories being lost to the void feels so apt to Rooms of the House, the subdued and contorted sounds combining into one for a whole experience unlike any other.

Seanchan: Did a first listen and I feel like this is a repeat of last week, just with more traditional rock rather than metal. Once again, I failed to find much in the instrumentation and found the vocals to be not good. It was just a lot of yell-y/scream-y vocals with some seemingly random rock beats. Again, I just felt a disconnect between the vocals and the instrumentation. This is 10+ minutes shorter than last week's album but you could have fooled me with how interminable it felt.

Okay, now let me try to walk it back some.

I will of course be giving this another few listens this week. And I will try to pay more attention to the lyrics. I listened to this on an afternoon walk and that's not particularly conducive to absorbing/appreciating lyrics, especially for me with a new album. I think I find more enjoyment in how singing melds with the instruments (maybe some of the reason I enjoyed Roses so much with the French lyrics). An album that's so lyric and story focused is a tough sell for me and there was certainly points where my brain went all Charlie Brown's teacher ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss2hULhXf04 ). All that said, I kind of enjoyed the last song a bit.

Snake5555555555: Perfectly okay! I hope the album grows on you once you pay more attention to the lyrics. Jordan Dreyer, the vocalist and main lyricist, would probably agree that he's not the best singer in the world, as his background is mainly in poetry and literature.

Steiner: might not be able to rank, we'll see how busy i am at the weekend, but from early listening i love this

Seanchan: Sorry, this one's only getting two listens this week. I did sit down and pay more attention to the lyrics, which really revealed the absolute DENSITY of this album lyrically. Like, there's hardly any choruses at all, which is just tough for me because there's nothing to latch onto. So many of the songs just start and it's a 3.5-4.5 minute barrage of story, which would be fine except I find the singing to be kind of atrocious, especially when he got into that yell/scream range. I also did pick up on some of that interweaving of lyrics/themes/whatever between some of the songs.

Woman (in mirror) was a fairly easy choice as #1. It didn't grate on me, had a nice little beat, and I did enjoy that lyric "tiny dots on an endless timeline". I already mentioned how a kind of liked Objects in Space on my first listen and that remained the case, despite it being spoken word rather than singing. The middle songs had some good lyrics or poignancy. The ones at the bottom had too much yell/scream for my tastes at were kind of hard to get through.

Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of this. I'm glad to have given it a shot but I cannot envision myself ever listening to this again.

MetalmindStats: This album feels sort of personal to me in totally different ways than it must have been to its makers, which I reckon is only fitting.

Rooms of the House track ranking

11. For Mayor in Splitsville (Track #5)
Score: 21 (Average Rank: 9.14/11)
Biggest Fan(s): Seanchan (#3)
Biggest Detractor(s): Snake5555555555, FoolFantastic, Johnbobb, MetalmindStats (#11)

10. 35 (Track #6)
Score: 32 (Average Rank: 8/11)
Biggest Fan(s): HBJDubs (#1)
Biggest Detractor(s): Snake5555555555, Raetsel_Lapin, MetalmindStats (#10)

9. Extraordinary Dinner Party (Track #10)
Score: 32 (Average Rank: 7.43/11)
Biggest Fan(s): MetalmindStats (#4)
Biggest Detractor(s): Johnbobb (#10)

8. Scenes from Highways 1981-2009 (Track #4)
Score: 36 (Average Rank: 6.86/11)
Biggest Fan(s): Raetsel_Lapin, MetalmindStats (#5)
Biggest Detractor(s): Seanchan (#10)

7. First Reactions After Falling Through the Ice (Track #2)
Score: 44 (Average Rank: 6.29/11)
Biggest Fan(s): Raetsel_Lapin (#2)
Biggest Detractor(s): FoolFantastic (#10)

6. Stay Happy There (Track #7)
Score: 50 (Average Rank: 5.43/11)
Biggest Fan(s): Snake5555555555, FoolFantastic (#2)
Biggest Detractor(s): Raetsel_Lapin (#11)

4 (tie). Hudsonville, MI 1956 (Track #1)
Score: 52 (Average Rank: 5.29/11)
Biggest Fan(s): MetalmindStats (#1)
Biggest Detractor(s): Seanchan (#11)

4 (tie). Objects in Space (Track #11)
Score: 52 (Average Rank: 5.29/11)
Biggest Fan(s): Seanchan, Johnbobb (#2)
Biggest Detractor(s): HBJDubs (#11)

3. The Child We Lost in 1963 (Track #8)
Score: 56 (Average Rank: 4.71/11)
Biggest Fan(s): Johnbobb (#1)
Biggest Detractor(s): HBJDubs (#9)

2. Woman (reading) (Track #9)
Score: 66 (Average Rank: 4/11)
Biggest Fan(s): Snake5555555555, Raetsel_Lapin (#1)
Biggest Detractor(s): Seanchan (#8)

1. Woman (in mirror) (Track #3)
Score: 70 (Average Rank: 3.57/11)
Biggest Fan(s): Seanchan, FoolFantastic (#1)
Biggest Detractor(s): Raetsel_Lapin (#8)

I am already excited for VeryInsane's week, no matter the choice. I was considering a non-Kendrick/Kanye 2010s rap week myself before settling on a 2022 week, and Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition would have been my top choice for that. And we certainly can't go wrong with the other two.

I almost nominated Illmatic so many times

Bump

Just passing by to say wow, what a trio of picks by VeryInsane. Not even sure if i'll vote because I'd love to do any of those!

1: Never Mine
2: Don't Feel Like Crying
3: Mine Right Now
4: Sight Of You
5: Strangers
6: Basic
7: Dynamite
8: In Vain
9: Sucker Punch
10: Don't Kill My Vibe
11: Business Dinners
12: Level Up

Yeah I voted Illmatic of course but all three are great options

First listen done.

OH MY GOD IS THIS ALBUM SUCH A BREATH OF FREAH AIR! Just nice easy, approachable pop. So much more my speed after the last 2 weeks. Im going to make the easy comparison and say it reminded me of Lorde a bit.

bump

up

Bump-o.

Did a 2nd listen yesterday.

Sight of You sounds like such a Coldplay song. Listen to it but imagine Chris Martin singing instead. It was driving me crazy!

bump

I'll get to a first listen today. I've been doing too many things at once - things I put off because I was busy.

Strangers
Mine Right Now
Sucker Punch
Don't Kill My Vibe
Level Up
Sight of You
Never Mine
Dynamite
In Vain
Don't Feel Like Crying
Business Dinners
Basic

I'll get my rankings in finally tonight, but we might be breaking participation records here!

ZaziGuado posted...

I'll get my rankings in finally tonight, but we might be breaking participation records here!

I did one listen, will do another.

My mind has been all over the place this week playing catch-up. Never got around to last week's, either. It's just a busy time of year.

Basic
Strangers
Don't Kill My Vibe
Sight Of You
Dynamite
Mine Right Now
Never Mine
Business Dinners
Don't Feel Like Crying
Sucker Punch
In Vain
Level Up

No strong feelings for any song in particular, album is okay. Probably need more time listening to see if something can get me hooked in

Still not super vibing with this one, for what is probably the 4th week in a row unfortunately (La Dispute was solid but nowhere near like RATM and Elton John before it). Now that it's bad by any means; Sigrid has a lovely voice, but a lot of it just feels a little too generic poppy. Great vocals over okay beats and kinda bland lyrics that put a catchy beat above all else. Again, I'm being a little harsher than I need to. I didn't dislike it, and definitely bobbed my head to it more than once, but it's not one I'd put on my playlist.

Also it reminds me just a little too much of Natalie Portman's vague pop singer character in Vox Lux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbIEiac-0PY

1. Mine Right Now
2. In Vain
3. Level Up
4. Don't Feel Like Crying
5. Don't Kill My Vibe
6. Sucker Punch
7. Strangers
8. Never Mine
9. Dynamite
10. Sight of You
11. Business Dinners
12. Basic - okay this one I did dislike

I think we definitely needed something like this. Light, catchy bubblegum pop to help balance the redundant instrumentation of the last couple weeks. The songs here are somewhat more variant - only somewhat, since these songs fall into one of three buckets, buckets that have slight overlap. I happened to enjoy the "string section" bucket the best, alongside "In Vain."

1. In Vain
2. Sight of You
3. Don't Feel Like Crying
4. Sucker Punch
5. Dynamite
6. Mine Right Now
7. Business Dinners
8. Never Mine
9. Don't Kill My Vibe
10. Strangers
11. Basic
12. Level Up

Don't Kill My Vibe
Don't Feel Like Crying
Strangers
In Vain
Sucker Punch
Sight of You
Mine Right Now
Dynamite
Never Mine
Basic
Level Up
Business Dinners

Sigrid was only 22 when this album dropped and I think the most impressive thing about it is how she is able to sing and perform in such a self-assured and infectious manner from such a young age. Sucker Punch doesn't revolutionize the pop sound and the material is pretty by the book. Sigrid simply shows that she is able to do this as well as any current pop artist.

Oh shit! Almost forgot about this! Need ti do that last listen now

1. Don't Kill My Vibe
2. Sucker Punch
3. In Vain
4. Strangers
5. Mine Right Now
6. Don't Feel Like Crying
7. Basic
8. Level Up
9. Never Mine
10. Dynamite
11. Sight of You
12. Business Dinners

I'm going to echo a lot of others sentiments here when I say that this is just the definition of poppy pop. And I'm totally fine with that, especially after the last few weeks, because that's a type of music I tend to like. And I enjoyed this, but only to the level of "like". Ultimately though, I feel like this is going to be one of those super ephemeral albums that's completely enjoyable in the moment but leaves no lasting mark.

To put it another way (and I'm casting my eyes towards next week's BSB album), Sigrid is an artist you'd find hanging out on the lower end of TRL's Top 10. Maybe you'd see one of her songs spike up to 4-5 after she appeared on the show, but not someone who would be fighting with BSB/NSync/Britney/Christina for that top spot. It's an album that's derivative of an era, not defining it.

Strangers
Sucker Punch
Dont Feel Like Crying
Dont Kill My Vibe
Dynamite
Mine Right Now
In Vain
Never Mind
Basic
Level Up
Business Dinners
Sight of You

1. Sucker Punch
2. Strangers
3. Dynamite
4. Dont Kill My Vibe
5. Basic
6. Dont Feel Like Crying
7. In Vain
8. Never Mind
9. Level Up
10. Mine Right Now
11. Sight of You
12. Business Dinners

Sigrid's Sucker Punch features brash and moody themes that she likes to infuse with a dose of nostalgia. However, a lot of the songs blend together too easily making the overall experience a confusing one. Decent choruses and some pretty vocals are present, but Sucker Punch becomes too forgettable as the songs become repetitive. Sigrid has the flair for merging music and emotion, but the music doesn't make quite a full impact on me, and the album becomes a big letdown because I feel Sigrid has the potential to do so much more.

1. Dynamite
2. Strangers
3. Dont Feel Like Crying
4. Dont Kill My Vibe
5. Sucker Punch
6. Business Dinners
7. Basic
8. In Vain
9. Mine Right Now
10. Never Mine
11. Sight of You
12. Level Up

Seanchan posted...

To put it another way (and I'm casting my eyes towards next week's BSB album), Sigrid is an artist you'd find hanging out on the lower end of TRL's Top 10. Maybe you'd see one of her songs spike up to 4-5 after she appeared on the show, but not someone who would be fighting with BSB/NSync/Britney/Christina for that top spot. It's an album that's derivative of an era, not defining it.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this, certainly at least in as much as Sucker Punch feels a lot less manufactured to me than I'd expect from those comparisons. Perhaps that's simply because I seem to like it more than most of us do, though.

I've been slacking off with my comments, but I do want to say that, of the handful of albums I have had no exposure* to before their week, Sucker Punch has been my favorite. It's very much a modern pop album and can't escape a ton of easy comparisons, but it's still solidly good throughout. Other artists have been referenced, but the one I kept thinking of is Olivia Rodrigo - and this gets the benefit of having released first.

*Er, I just checked and noticed "Don't Kill My Vibe" is in the Acclaimed Music Top 10,000 song list - considering I have gone through that full list, I must have listened to it at some point and forgot.

I think what helps make Sigrid stand out is that while she sings about heartbreak (as all pop artists do), she does it without a ton of angst. It's a manner of "yeah this sucks but onwards and upwards", y'know?

MetalmindStats posted...

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this, certainly at least in as much as Sucker Punch feels a lot less manufactured to me than I'd expect from those comparisons. Perhaps that's simply because I seem to like it more than most of us do, though.

I should clarify that I'm not making any judgement on talent versus those late 90s artists. Certainly there is many times only a tangential relationship between talent and popularity/success. I don't know if Sigrid is also the songwriter for her music like Lorde or Swift. It's not something I usually pay attention to, though people usually let you know when the pop singer is also the songwriter.

I guess my feeling is that Sucker Punch isn't anything..."special". I'm not super big on Lorde but I know she's held in high regard for that general time of pop. I think Future Nostalgia is likely to stand the test of time and be regarded as a classic of the era. I could totally be wrong about Sigrid/Sucker Punch though! Who knows!

I hate that this all makes me sound much more negative than my feelings on the album. I've not listened to next week's album yet but I'm skeptical that I will enjoy it more than this one.