ariana grande - yours truly

Agreed that the Mika track is a chore but would you guys like "Almost Is Never Enough" if the guy from The Wanted wasn't on it? I mean, it sounds more '90s R&B (in the vein you guys are referencing) than a lot of other songs on the album.

i feel that but its shortcomings (whatever these may truly be bc i sure as hell can't totally identify them) cause me to zone out

Agreed that the Mika track is a chore but would you guys like "Almost Is Never Enough" if the guy from The Wanted wasn't on it?

i don't particularly care about the wanted dude. song is very labored-sounding

I enjoyed this quite a lot when skimming on iTunes stream but I'm not sure that there's anything quite as astonishing as The Wanted's "I Found You" anyway.

ha i thought me and jordan were the only people here that liked that song

i had no expectations of the ariana grande (hadn't even heard "baby i" much beforehand) so it surpassed whatever they were

i thought one direction were meant to have completely killed the wanted's career? such a terrible, pointless boy band

for someone who nobody really rightfully expected to be a pop star worth watching before she did a song with mac miller six months ago i think it's fair to just enjoy the album for what it is and not worry about falling short of some specific ideal.

― to smang a topanga (some dude), Monday, September 2, 2013 5:13 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Are you saying this because of her teen tv star origins? I had no knowledge of her (Disney? Nick?) origins, so my expectations were formed by me thinking her first three singles were good to great. And even with that knowledge, I'd have still maybe been slightly underwhelmed. It's not like her beginnings condemn her to releasing weak material. Demi Lovato's Disney origins didn't stop Here We Go Again from being a good album.

ha i thought me and jordan were the only people here that liked that song

― to smang a topanga (some dude), Monday, 2 September 2013 21:40 (24 minutes ago) Permalink

dude it's my favourite song of all time.

i'm not really dissing the Disney pedigree, Demi's first 2 albums are both classics to me. more saying that she was an unknown quantity before "The Way," but it's not like the 4 Non Blondes swag she was working with before that was especially promising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc1jscuFnas

I didn't know the name or the voice of The Wanted dude when I first heard the album and just thought the song was a nice slice of the 90s. Mika is the only inexcusable inclusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OGyHRKMPOE

(I liked "I Found You"! And then they went and became shit again, see above)

that song is really bad

this is great, best ilx pop rec in a while thx yall

i trust flopson, ill check this out

ha i thought me and jordan were the only people here that liked that song

― to smang a topanga (some dude), Monday, 2 September 2013 21:40 (24 minutes ago) Permalink

dude it's my favourite song of all time.

― Tim F, Monday, September 2, 2013 6:05 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i found you is sort of hard to not like

imo

also gr8 to see all you victorious fans joining me here!

right? ;_;

sam & cat >>>>

All I know by The Wanted is "I'm Glad You Came" and that song is the fucking worst.

it is, but "I Found You" is actually dope

"glad you came" is as good imo

sam & cat >>>>

― to smang a topanga (some dude), Monday, September 2, 2013 10:52 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haven't caught it yet but v excited

j0rdan you know you just sent rev for the hills right

what's particularly objectionable about "glad you came"

the double entendre?

eh, it's not a dealbreaker, as long as you don't play it around me.

THAT DUDE'S VOICE

yeah. that one voice is awful.

also, it's just an annoyingly nagging tune

glad you came is dope imo

but def in a cheesy way

Don't mind Glad You Came. Walks Like Rihanna is up there for worst song of the year, tho,

has "baby i" only just become a single? was surprised not to find an official video on youtube

it was only released in late July and debuted on charts via downloads, hasn't seemed to get any kind of radio push yet

ok i'm sitting down w/ the album for the first time and when i got to the "Real Love" jack something in me just kinda went THAT'S TOO FAR

good of you to tell ppl how they should enjoy the album when u hadnt heard it

i just thought it was weird how people's expectations for her went from 0 to 60 overnight, with a debut album i think you gotta allow for the possibility that it will actually sound like a debut album

yeah, even the singles weren't all that impressive

The key-changes and Broadway moments littering this are what's keeping me from getting completely on board, I'm not so much against the appearance of middling rappers as I am the ballads. Really strong debut though.

Loving this obviously, but it doesn't feel like 90s R&B to me so much as early-00s pop music (Samantha Mumba, Stacie Orrico, Dream, 3LW, etc.) Clearly her voice and her vocal arrangements harken back to 90s Mariah Carey, and the BIG OBVIOUS 90s samples make it easy to say "90s R&B pastiche" - but the songwriting and especially the production has the sheen of early 00s pop all over it. And all of the 'trap' hi-hats on this album remind of the post-Timbo/Darkchild skittery drums that were on like EVERY pop song from 2000-2003.

yeah i'm definitely not saying that it achieves any kind of uncanny fidelity to the mid-90s era it grabs a few samples from -- i remember the first time i watched "The Way" video and kinda feeling like if you swap out the guest rapper it could've been made at pretty much any point in the last 10 years.

actually the remix with Fabolous effectively makes the timewarp effect complete.

also makes the song a lot better

smh kids these days dont even know what a decent guest rap is

page me (lol) when mac miller comes up w/ something as clever as rhyming "catch up with a model" and "ketchup in a bottle"

Ok, so I'm listening to this and kind of glad it doesn't actually actually sound like 90s r&b cause then it would come off too studied and eyerollworthy. Not as into "Piano" as everyone else, and haven't hit the dreaded end stretch but so far this is jams, yeah.

Song with Wanted dude is fine, didn't even make it to the end of the Mika song's first chorus, last song works in a kind of CRJ-ish way but feels out of place.

i thought the mac miller verse was pitch perfect! can't nobody do it like fab mind you

It feels like an r&b album that could have come from the last ten years but it codes as "pop" in a way that harks back to r&b's chart dominance, as opposed to today's dance/EDM pop landscape.

"Loving this obviously, but it doesn't feel like 90s R&B to me so much as early-00s pop music (Samantha Mumba, Stacie Orrico, Dream, 3LW, etc.)"

see this suggests I should love this but I don't

coming around to this bc i finally listened to it while outside

It’s a reissue with the new recordings and a week of other stuff: https://pitchfork.com/news/ariana-grande-releasing-yours-truly-10th-anniversary-reissue-friday/

Oh snap, we got OG Honeymoon Ave <3

I’m pleased to report that she still sounds great (no surprise). Wish this wasn’t digital-only; maybe they’ll drop a CD at some point

Does it seem impossible to anyone else that her entire discography is only 10 years old?

Yeah totally… it’s hard to wrap my head around

Well 6 albums in 10 years is quite impressive indeed but not that crazy thinking about it. Lana has released all her 9 albums between 11 and 23 and Taylor has released 7 (new) albums between 12 and 22 for instance. But then if one compares to Rihanna…

Yes but it’s 6 ~iconic~ albums ;)

;)

Those are good comps, AIXTC; Dawn Richard and Charli XCX also released Goldenheart and True Romance, respectively, in 2013, and Jessie Ware's Devotion was 2012. So there are more than a few great artists with impressive discographies that emerged about that time.

Maybe it's connected to aging. As I get older, 10 years really doesn't feel like that long to me, but Grande's only 30 so that's more or less her entire adult life.

This Variety article brings up the six-albums-in-10-years thing (it's not entirely clear what they're getting at with this line of inquiry, but nice to see them raise the point "to be fair"):

What is perhaps most unusual about Grande and Bieber is that neither artist has released a major project under their own name in several years: Grande has released singles with the Weeknd and others but has not released any music under her own name since her “Positions” album in the fall of 2020; Bieber has dropped a few singles but his last full album was “Justice” in early 2021. The artists are 30 and 29 respectively, peak years for artists on their scale: For just two examples, at 30, Madonna released “Like a Prayer” and Justin Timberlake was at the commercial peak of his music and acting careers.

However, to be fair, Grande released six albums in seven years and has been deep in making “Wicked” for the past year; Bieber was on tour and in ill health; they’d both earned breaks, although it is a long time for such major artists to go without releasing new music.

(sorry, 6 albs in 7 years... and then a ~mysterious hiatus~ in which she's been, in part, filming two movies back-to-back... which Variety doesn't seem to accept as an excuse, lol)

I do like the idea of looking back on Wikipedia to see what other artists were doing at age 30, tho

So many of her best jams (honeymoon/baby i/tattooed heart/PIANO!/daydreamin') but after the first eight or nine songs it drops off a fukkin' CLIFF. Still, what a run

This is an old post but I wanted to build off it. I totally agree w/these sentiments – except I <3 the duet (track 10), so that really just leaves the two relatively weaker songs at the end which keep it from being an absolute classic.

“Popular” is weird b/c AG isn’t even the credited artist – it’s a reworked version of the other guy’s song, with Ariana added for the single version (and it was then stuck onto her album). “Better Left Unsaid” is an OK closer, and it’s of a piece with the album generally, but slightly below par.

Thing is, there just weren’t two more great songs on deck (I think they’re all out there). Would it have been a slam dunk to stick “Pink Champagne” and “Boyfriend Material” in those spots? Fun songs, but nah. It may have cool to end with “OG Honeymoon Avenue”… but maybe a little too “cute” a move? Anyway, with the 10th Anniversary Ed., it’s now there…

The artists are 30 and 29 respectively, peak years for artists on their scale: For just two examples, at 30, Madonna released “Like a Prayer” and Justin Timberlake was at the commercial peak of his music and acting careers.

This is such a weird argument:

1. Like A Prayer arrived nearly 3 years after True Blue, with only a remix album and some movie soundtrack tie-ins in between.

2. When Justin turned 30 in early 2011 it had been over 4 years since his last album, and it would be more than 2 years until his next one.