British Sea Power

Zeus EP still their best release yes good glad we all agree

Tie between Zeus and Man of Aran imho, but the ep is great yes.

MOA great too yes but I'd feel their best release had to have some of their pop sensibility involved

In theory, but all the great albums with the pop sensibility all have their minor weaknesses imho. MOA is a wholly finished concept album, great from start to finish.

(I can't live without ' Cleaning out the Rooms' though tbh)

^ Also my favourite.

With this album, I've found myself a) strangely disinterested in hearing it and b) oddly cynical about the positive reviews I've read.

Yeah it was a shame they had to reuse Cleaning Out The Rooms on the ensuing album because it was obviously the best thing on it and a sign they'd been a bit short of inspiration

lol what. i think just possibly they conceived of the ep after the album was done. maybe they cobbled the album together in the 2 months between the respective releases but i am skeptical

Well then why is Mongk on the EP and Mongk 2 on the album then, u mongk

Well then why is Mongk on the EP and Mongk 2 on the album then, u mongk

In an interview with Drowned in Sound, guitarist Martin Noble stated:

Believe it or not, ‘Mongk II’ was actually written first and ‘Mongk’ which came out first is a remix! We’d always intended saving ‘Mongk II’ for the album anyway so when it came to putting together Zeus we did a different version of ‘Mongk’ which became number one.

Fine well I have no idea why I prefer the EP then, imo Zeus and Bear are both better than anything on VD as well, no idea of the choices that went into it all

Think Bear is my BSP OPO

i guess they just had a lot of material, the album is already an hour long. there's no place for zeus, i am sure the idea for the EP at all was based on them having zeus and nothing else to do with it. maybe you could make room for bear, take something else off, although i am not sure what. and if they had decided to put cleaning out the rooms on every subsequent release i wouldn't blame them or complain.

Man, this is my favorite BSP album since '05's Open Season. I'm almost never in agreement with "comeback" albums, though. I thought last year's Rogue Wave album was their best ever.

cd80

lights our for darker skies
no lucifer
loving animals
apologies to insect life
cleaning out the rooms
spring has spring
like a honeycomb
international space station
how will i ever find my way home?
bear
mongk II
it ended on an oily stage
oh larson b
when a warm wind blows through the grass
carrion
true adventures

I've been a little cold on this band for years, so imagine my surprise when I found myself listening to their debut 2 or 3 three times today... 'Lately' in particular blew me away. I'm gonna give their other records another chance.

You're in for a treat, go chronologically to appreciate their development.

Meanwhile, their last couple of records are good but not great, haven't stuck in my head like previous albums.

"Lately" was the one that did it for me back when that record came out

Well shit, Open Season is also hitting the spot!

Open Season is really good, DYLRM stumbles a bit (though it didn't deserve the Pitchfork joke review treatment it got)

DYLRM got a positive pfork review iirc. the bad ones were valhalla and machineries, both by ian cohen so

oh shit. nm. i remember now

"True Adventures" from Open Season is one of my all-time favorite album-closers.

Yeah, 'True Adventures' rules... and I'll bet it sounds better in a live environment. I really need to see this band live.

Onto Do You Like Rock Music? ... it's a bit cleaner and feels more beefed-up/muscular compared to the previous two - I'm loving it, though!

Do You Like Rock Music? had a pretty strong effect on me - in a way the rest of their stuff just hasn't (chunks of Man of Arran aside). I still listen every few months. Need to revisit the earlier albums.

Holy shit, 'We Close Our Eyes' is an incredible closer - these guys really know how to do epics.

Damn, I hadn't seen that Pitchfork review of "Valhalla Dancehall". They miss the point completely, it's exactly their attempt to "marry both their quirkier sensibilities and arena-level hooks" that makes it so compelling and downright fun! The "Zeus" mini-album is arguable even better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDPS3u_DBw4

I really like 'Zeus'. "Cleaning Out The Rooms" might be my favourite BSP song.

Of course that's on the album too. The other 'Zeus' track I love is "Bear".

^ Their two best songs. I'm refusing to buy the new album unless anyone makes the claim that there is a song as good on there.

No one will make that claim.

that's a cruelly high standard. and not really close.

Halfway through Valhalla Dancehall and I now officially love this band - nobody is as surprised about this as much as I am and I'm left wondering why this stuff didn't click with me before. Maybe it was just that I needed to hear the right song at the right time.

I haven't picked up the new album yet, the singles have sounded fine but 'Machineries of Joy' passed me by a little when it came out, I bought it but must have been to busy listening to other things to properly get into it.

Maybe it was just that I needed to hear the right song at the right time.

I could list dozens of bands where that was true for me. I still revisit things to see if the intervening years of listening has changed my perceptions.

Back to BSP: they've got a large cache of non-lp material, much of which is worth hearing. This is my single favorite obscurity, though it's cheating a bit because the vocals are handled by Kateřina Winterová of Ecstasy of Saint Theresa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgpNZSxwPU

There's an older version of that song with Hamilton on vocals that's just as Lovely.

IIRC it concerns the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c_XaSrLzEM

Was really disappointed by Open Season and Do You Like Rock Music. They were not bad albums at all but the debut was amazing and got me thinking they were going to be one of the great rock bands of their era. I'd love a compilation of the early singles and EPs, surprised it never happened by now.

I've been a little hesitant to check the new stuff. I felt Open Season suffered for not using their better singer enough (I don't know their names) because one is way better than the other.

fwiw the same singer, yan, sings all but 2 songs on decline and all but 3 on open season. i would characterize those first two and the most recent as the most dominated by him.

Is this the most recent thread? Anyway, they have announced they've changed their name - they've dropped the "British" bit.

International Sea Power

https://slinky.to/twofingers

I mean, hey, good enough reasoning for me:

On Monday 9 August 2021, the band announced that they would henceforth be known as Sea Power due to “a rise in a certain kind of nationalism in this world – an isolationist, antagonistic nationalism that (they) don’t want to run any risk of being confused with.”

New single sounds very promising. I mean, yeah, nothing radically new in their sound but it's still a sound I dig.

otm

Excited to see where they go from here.

Anyone particularly feeling the album?

I'll sit down and give it a listen this evening. Press seems positive.