Mitski

well in my close-listening post there i discover that yeah while there's a lot going on there is a laconic & very defeated vibe at the heart of these songs

(and this is coming from someone who very much likes pop maximalism -- like, something like Goldfrapp's "Ocean" is maximalist. or to keep things in the same general singer-songwriter vein, St. Vincent's "Fear the Future" is maximalist. maybe my bar for maximalist is just set way higher in music, it's set way higher in everything else in life after all)

i wonder if we have different definitions of maximalism. i think this is maximalist because the music has a lot of layers working in different but mutually-beneficial ways, but emotionally it is very melancholy. i don't think that stops it from being maximalist

xp -- yeah, "laconic and defeated" is key and it's basically what she's said in every interview. like "Lonesome Love" is a hollowed-out <i>She Hangs Brightly</i> track -- it's basically exactly "Be My Angel"-- and it being hollowed-out and anti-climactic, pun intended, is the whole point

listening to 'fear the future' now (reluctantly as imo st vincent got p bad, 'actor' is still good) and i don't see how this is any more maximalistic than mitski. tbh its layers seem to be working more straightforwardly together than mitski's. there's electronic beats and big keyboards but it kind of just coalesces into one big thudding sugary triumphalist soup

I mean, if you can't hear a fundamental difference in musical and emotional scale I'm not sure how to ever explain this

also not sure I'd apply the term "triumphalist" to a track that goes, very loudly, "I FEAR THE FUTURE," but

willing to bet what is left of my reputation on the average track on 'be the cowboy' having more layers than the average track on 'masseduction'. not that number of layers maps perfectly onto how maximalist something is but...yeah

number of layers has nothing to do imo with how maximalist something sounds either on a literal level -- tracks tend to have a lot of layers that simply aren't obviously heard -- or figuratively. like, a cliff is more maximalist than an onion, even if the cliff is just one huge chunk of solid rock and the onion has dozens of layers

a cliff comprises thousands of fossilised strata

no shit, that is why I specified "even if"

:D

I realized 'Two Slow Dancers' was the track I disliked, not "Blue Light."

Contemporary maximalist music is defined by composer David A. Jaffe as that which "embraces heterogeneity and allows for complex systems of juxtapositions and collisions, in which all outside influences are viewed as potential raw material".[7] Examples include the music of Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and Frank Zappa.[8] In a different sense, Milton Babbitt has been described as a "professed maximalist", his goal being, "to make music as much as it can be rather than as little as one can get away with".[9] Richard Toop, on the other hand, considers that musical maximalism "is to be understood at least partly as 'antiminimalism'".[10] Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) has also been described as a maximalist work.[11][12]

if you're going to copy paste from wikipedia at least remove the footnote tags

imago, are you really going to argue these points

this exquisite aspie vibe (yes i just diagnosed mitski, w/e

Wow, with defenders like this...

anyway I'd make the opposite argument -- I do like this album, but if you are looking for maximalism then it isn't for you, and your reaction will probably be that nothing is as good as "Geyser," that "Nobody" is tepid as disco goes, and that everything else is solidly fine

And that's the trick, I think. "Nobody" isn't disco -- it's disco-influenced, uses disco as one might a citation in a paper.

obviously

well with the additional bit of context that 90% of songs these days seem to be disco-influenced so the trick doesn't seem as novel

it isn't close to being my favourite track on the album but it doesn't sound like an iteration we've heard much of before

I preferred it as a single but it's fine.

see I agree with Matt on this one, if you're going to do disco you have to do the disco. doing half-hearted disco as a songwriting trick might have worked in 1998 but not in 2018 when every person in the universe is making half-hearted disco as a matter of course. nothing to do with the content either -- "Dancing on My Own" wouldn't work either if the instrumental wasn't huge

Great, I'm now hearing the words "a cliff comprises thousands of fossilised strata" to the tune of the Science Facts from Nobody

i don't find it half-hearted. it's obviously executed well if unsubtly (which is UNLIKE the rest of the album) - it's definitely a bold centrepiece amidst the greater sophistication and complexity of the surrounding tracks. the way it ends is the biggest clue to its function - the high-octane attempt to burst free that fails. obviously failure, in some sense, is in most if not all of these songs and that isn't a way of excusing flaws - the album is extremely good at failing, falling apart, managing its own pathos

also lol will

yes, the ending is key, but the ending would have even more impact if the disco had more oomph

well as i say it isn't my favourite track. i wish we'd talk about the other songs more

(and there's of course the perennial issue that even if perfectly executed, in every possible way, does exactly the songwriting job it is intended to do in the best way possible, it's still a half-hearted disco track when there are other disco tracks that are not half-hearted that can be listened to instead. this is incredibly frustrating because I do like this album, I just don't personally love it, and I think for me the maximalism issue is why)

The creepy comfort offered by "Me and My Husband" gets me every time.

I really like "Nobody", it's a very moving track for me, even if it is not authentic disco. The vocal melodies and chord changes are really masterful the way they wind in some unexpected directions. Probably my favorite, along with "Old Friend".

my favorite track at this point is probably "Come Into the Water," which is perfectly hushed and grapples with a thing not always grappled with in this way

FWIW I do like the vocal melodies on this but the production/arrangements really do kill my enjoyment of it as a whole.

"Nobody" has a really nice build, but it builds to a fairly predictable place, musically--it's enough for me because that chorus melody is incredible, it seems to mimic a sweeping melody that in a classic disco would have been delivered by the string section

yeah, that feels about right

I don't find 'Nobody' to be particularly half-hearted (if anything its enthusiasm is part of the problem, it's just a bit clunky). But then this is the same sort of circular argument you get when indie acts try their hand at other genres - ("yeah but why is the execution so clunky" vs "no the clunkiness is part of the point"). And I suppose it's that latter viewpoint which is what irritates me about modern indie culture.

but when it morphs at the end into something else, that's where it becomes elegant. elegance and clunkiness in eternal dialectic

lj and matt dc both making a pretty great case against this album

the three lead songs

These are still the standouts for me, after several listens. "Nobody" is incredible imo (and I don't want it to be 'real' disco) but so far the album as a whole hasn't grabbed me as immediately as the last one.

album is fire

There is something about her vocals—a pervading sadness that even disco can’t lighten

well, performers often used disco to convey sadness, hysteria, or both.

true. i still perceive a tension between the vocals and the backing track in this song.

like that little bossa nova "nobody nobody" when she is saying nobody wants her

nobody reminds me of lovefool for some reason, which distracted me at first but i have made peace with it now

geyser is so colossal, and has been my favourite song of the year since the day it came out, that it's gonna take a lot of momentum for anything on this album to topple it. But, A Pearl sure is making a case. What a song

Yes, it definitely sounds like a more muscular "Lovefool"

lovefool is a good song

True

lovefool is a great song! just noticing the similarity was distracting me until i listened a few uh dozen or so more times

I may be misremembering due to age/cultural osmosis but was "lovefool" released during a massive boom of fake disco

also the cardigans' whole thing was ironic/winking takes on genres, at least at that point -- see their past metal covers