FKA twigs

apparently not

fwiw I am gonna check out some of the names you mentioned, katherine! Didn't see a problem with your posts itt/dissenters in general

some of them could have been worded more politely in retrospect, and I apologize for that. basically now I feel like a piece of shit.

OK, that is really weird, because the discussion on this thread had been entirely good-natured and in good faith. I'm sorry you're being targeted by some disgruntled weirdo, katherine (but I'm certainly aware of the hostility ILX can generate towards women who dare to express opinions, especially contrary ones, in public.)

Yeah surely there's nothing wrong with explaining why you don't rate an album. I'm not particularly into LP1 but I don't have even half a well-thought-out rationale as katherine has.

yeah an um has the person sending the email read the whole rest of ilx cause

not conforming to optimized levels of politeness DNE being a piece of shit!!

one of the things i like about this album is that it's kinda... idk i don't want to say vulgar but it can be kinda filthy

or maybe just in contrast with my expectations for this kind of music?

OK, yikes. katharine, that was me and I signed the email, and it was not designed to make you feel like a piece of shit, and there's no targeting or disgruntledness, and I did it off-thread specifically not to call you out or turn the thread into a meta-discussion.

I sent it through the ILX mail system, so I can't retrieve the text, but you're welcome to post it here if you want. I really didn't think I said anything mean-spirited or inappropriate.

All I meant to do was to encourage you to step away from a thread in which you find yourself saying things like "it's just that in almost any 'genre' you can assign it to, there are countless people doing the same, but better, and not beneficiaries of the same praise", because I recognize, from personal experience, that vivid sense of indignation. But there's no "better" in the seemingly objective way you're phrasing it. And I feel like I have learned, slowly and over time, that picking this kind of fight doesn't end up bringing about anything I want, and that there are always other threads on which I could spent my time less frustratingly. So I tried to share that with you. Privately. If I did it poorly, or didn't explain enough, or the ILX anonymizer made it seem creepier than I realized, then I apologize.

And of course you're within your rights (and ILX practice) to do pretty much whatever you want. I have no authority here, it was just a personal, private, non-offended, non-binding suggestion.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ltytlwomia7zcv5/facepalm.gif

oy

Please don't encourage Katherine to step away from any threads. I enjoy reading her thoughts about everything (even if I think she's wrong about this one).

Safe to say I accomplished nothing good by sending that note, either. I'm not sure what the moral of this experience is. Maybe it's that suggesting to someone that it's wrong to suggest that other people are wrong is still wrong.

To try to get this back on topic, I went and listened to the other singers you mentioned.

If the Rebecca Collins you mean is http://rebeccacollins.bandcamp.com, that doesn't sound much like FKA twigs to me at all. Sketchy, minimal, slightly off-key singer-songwriter stuff, but neither vocally nor instrumentally akin to FKA twigs to my ears.

The one Laura Sheeran song on Spotify is also in a pretty different space than FKA twigs, instrumentally, and the doubled vocals are creeping more towards Julianna Barwick. None of the twitchy/ethereal thing FKA twigs does.

Karoline Hausted gets into a little electronics on Echoes, but that still feels to me like a singer-songwriter album with a slightly shifted palette.

So when you say those three are doing the same thing as FKA twigs, I feel like we're experiencing different contexts, somehow. Did you really mean that you think they sound the same, or is it something else?

The last Goldfrapp album I thought had a pretty different kind of sensuality than LP1, but for me, at least, LP1's is more insistent and seems more like it's after something specific on its own terms. But wow is that a subjective thing.

And I loved Nicola Hitchcock (and Mandalay), but when you say "Every trip-hop vocalist in existence has recorded an album along these lines", I feel like those are not exactly the same lines. LP1 seems no more like trip hop to me than it does like r&b. Whereas it does feel to me very much like another participant in this interesting emerging marriage of evasive, gauzy, constructed music to drifty, deliberately almost-translucent singing that I feel like a bunch of other artists are also exploring, and in whose company FKA twigs seems to me to be holding her own and contributing something discernably her own. My onging playlist of what I mean by this is here: http://open.spotify.com/user/glennpmcdonald/playlist/4hniDhyHk26LwvrNALpr2G.

Katherine's posts've been fine and that ws rly rly creepy of you

And yeah this album sounds like a joyless Grimes imo

The thing about Grimes is that she is a thoroughly awesome person whose music I find almost wholly unbearable

(Meaning, the degree to which I respond to LP1 is inversely proportional to how I've responded to every Grimes song I've heard and that disparity of personal reaction makes me summarily discount any comparison between the two)

...in almost any "genre" you can assign it to, there are countless people doing the same, but better, and not beneficiaries of the same praise. ...the songs in which Richard does LP1's thing, she blows it out of the water. ...Every trip-hop vocalist in existence has recorded an album along these lines, most of which get ignored.

― katherine, Friday, August 15, 2014 2:20 PM (9 hours ago)

not siding w/ the sending weird mssgs part, and i always enjoy your posting, but i don't know what to make of criticisms like these. they have a the ring informed judgement, but are too sweepingly general to really grasp. it all strikes me as an elaborated version of, "i don't get what other people are seeing in this," or to strip things down further, "i don't like it as much as you."

which is fine, of course, but it's basically just an expression of taste. it doesn't say anything about the art's strengths or deficiencies (if art ever has those qualities). i like what i've heard of the album. the songs intrigue me, both as a sensual experience and in terms of the persona/ideas presented. i don't think of it as groundbreaking, forward-thinking or even particularly novel, but i do enjoy the listen, and that's far more important to me.

The thing is, ILM is often quite tolerant of 'not liking the thing' when it's posed in those terms: I just don't like the thing, I just don't get it, tell me what you're hearing here guys, because this just sounds like ... {a bag of sand or whatever} - to which the response will usually be something along the lines of "oh, but the intense *bagness* of the sand, and the wetness of the sandbag, and oh the sand, my god I love sand, have you ever seen sand that colour and texture before?"

What ILM tends to object to, is people who come in a thread where people are expressing love for something, and dismiss all that love with "but people only love this stuff because *off-base assumption that no one on this thread has actually said*!" The defence of "oh, but I'm not talking about you here, on this thread..." is not really a particularly good one considering that unless you have actually stated what you're talking about (what? Pitchfork? the Guardian? who?) the place you are making this criticism is on the thread, therefore you *are* indicting the thread and its denizens.

That was what I was trying to get at with my "oh lookit the exciting new contrarian stances" type posts. If one does not like having groundless and wrong assumptions made about your tastes and motivations, avoid putting them on others. I guess maybe it looked like I was needling katherine unnecessarily, but moving beyond the simple assumptions, and interrogating why you don't like something, and moving on to "well, I prefer A and B, I think they do X and Y better here" is more useful, because then we can have a conversation about *your* interpretations of X and Y rather than making assumptions about what other people think about X and Y.

But, y'know, the place for that is the ILM thread. And not creepy DMs, because let's face it, creepy unsolicited ILX DMs are not helpful (I've been hooking my ILX accounts to "use once and destroy" gmail accounts for the past 3 or 4 years to avoid getting any more of them).

http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/images/245x/TO67.jpg

^good album

i like this, but something about it seems so modish that i don't want to embrace it too tightly

Ban Glenn McDonald and lock this thread

max hi

Ban Glenn McDonald and lock this thread
http://www.legaljuice.com/files/2013/09/judge-gavel-order-in-the-court.gif

ban max.

max is cool

haha wait no offence glenn but that is an insane email to send. im totally down with people rolling into a thread and straight up saying "this is garbage and you are all nuts", so obv nothing katherine has said on this thread hits me as anything other than registering her thoughts on the album. what possible use is gatekeeping with some sort of if you cant say something nice dont say anything, esp here. every thread on this board is full of dissenters and thank god.

fka twigzzz more like hah owned

fpu stinkz

Ok, DMs considered inherently creepy here. Got it. Didn't know.

Before today how many people did you DM (per month) over differences of opinion about music

dm's aren't creepy

you are just over-helping in a situation that doesn't require it & the more you explain how much you were trying to help the weirder it gets :)

method was sound. contentwise, you're just kinda overdoing it & is veering towards condescending which I would hope was not yr intent

I think I've used the specific ILX email function at least once before in its history. Maybe twice. But in other contexts I've had parallel public and private conversations without it being weird (as far as I'm aware). But I accept that it's considered creepy here. I apologize again, and say again that I meant to cause LESS upset than a comment on-thread, not more.

in the future plz comment on thread with the intention of causing more upset, its like people dont even read the faq

Katherine you are well appreciated around here, don't let these shenanigans put you off coming here.

what is a DM?

depeche mode?

double mocha?

check ur dms

death metal

I love the ideal version of this album more than I love how this sounds - I am totally on board with zeitgeisty sensual goth-crunk - but I just don't think there's enough here to sell it. There's no intensity and I after two consecutive listens back-to-back I'm still struggling for memorable hooks. I think what really lets this album down is that she doesn't have a strong enough voice, or at least she doesn't do enough with it.

I'm not going to claim the Jessy Lanza album from last year was perfect but I feel like it mined a similar territory to this and it has a bit of an edge over this.

xps sup

what the christ has even happened, if anything I agreed and said I was sorry

anyway, to get back to the original topic, the album itself is fine but I wouldn't go so far as to call it singular. I'm a bit stuck because the album/track this is reminding me of is very specific and I just can't think of the name for the life of me. Every name I've mentioned is sort of half-approaching the matter.

Nothing about this album's basic premise or core sonic territory are particularly original but I feel like its treatment of those sounds is pretty singular. Comparing this to Dawn Richard is a case in point - I mean it's closer to Armor On than Goldenheart-era Dawn, but even then the two don't share very much beyond R&B source material and a penchant for bleepy noises and dressing up as space warriors. Even when Dawn is doing intimate ballads she's still a dominant presence and all about the grand gesture ("you are my scripture"; "I broke down all the walls for you", countless bit of comic book or fantasy imagery) whereas Twigs uses these cavernous sonic spaces as backdrops to intense intimacy. And I think their production and (especially) the treatment of their vocals bears those differences out.

In general the album sounds like a lot of things (the Preface alone gives you Julia Holter choral voices, chopped and screwed walrus vocals, clanking industrial drums and rumbling dubstep bass) but it's the way it puts those elements together that gives it its singularity. It sounds like lots of other things but at the same time not much else sounds quite like it. "Singular" to me doesn't mean "completely unlike anything I've heard before".

I suppose another comparison point might be Luomo circa The Present Lover, where if you were just listening in the background for the first time you'd think that is sounded pretty much like any number of tasteful vocal house records, and then the further you get into it the more the various details begin to distinguish it. Although sonically this is kind of on point too, given both records' tendency towards hall-of-mirrors type production.

man, as someone who wrote this album off after finding all of the eps and singles really dull, I am REALLY digging this

idgi