thread to dis hyped releases that you don't get/don't like/wanna complain about

Don't know what offenders you're talking about but 3 people so far have said they're not into it? Not a huge mutiny from the overall consensus, seems like.

The Ghost Club at 7:09 3 Oct 22

Yeah, the lyrics totally turned me off that album. I expect it'll still end up in AOTY lists from people who either don't listen to the lyrics or, worse, actually like them.

I'm not a fan of anything I find preachy and didactic, so I can understand hesitance with the CAxBP album, but I think the appeal is as much the delivery as the lyrics themselves - as a performer she's playful, theatrical and kitschy, all in ways that undercut the seriousness of the politics in the album. Even something as heavy-handed as the we're-being-ironic-do-you-see chorus of "Blenda" is undercut by those chipper "bye bye!" backing vocals. To my ears it's certainly more capital-f Fun than Sault or any of the angry post-Brexit rock bands I'm being nudged towards by algorithms and 6Music.

in other news how the fuck has medicore twunk Harry Styles become the biggest star on the planet just now

(I do know the answer to this, sadly)

extremely otm and on-point posting x2

xp

he was the only one bold enough to spit on Chris Pine

Harry Styles' whole thing is so oily

Tbh I can't get past the album covers. Something so self-important-seeming about having no text except precious 70s Columbia logo seal of quality blah blah

Is this a place I can talk about two recent UK no. 1s? LF System's Afraid to Feel and Eliza Rose & Interplanetary Criminal's B.O.T.A (Baddest of Them All). Neither of them is bad, in fact both are easily listenable in their chasing of classic funky house and speed garage modes respectively. But that's my problem - these were multi-week number ones in 2022 yet they sound like a no. 21 2002 hit by Dirty Vegas or someone (Afraid to Feel) or a no. 47 hit from 1997 (B.O.T.A). They're the sort of tracks which wouldn't have been big hits back then because more exciting examples were crossing over.

BOTA basically was a Top Twenty hit twenty years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfp2WSpGHUA

There's that! - although B.O.T.A.'s track reaches further back imo.

Banger btw

Actually listening to them side by side they're a lot more alike than had occurred to me. SHOCKIN

Yeah, 'Thank You' might be a bit much, but I suspect it knows it's a bit much. There are a lot of layers, it isn't just normie tweets. I'd be repulsed if it was

that settles it, then!

I wholly concur, a true scales-from-eyes moment. it’s now my 2022 AOTY So Far.
in fact, I would be in favour of us mandating imago to run ILM from here on out. if he would decide to ban everyone else from posting and recreate this sacred institution in his imag…e, renaming it ILIM, I will be fully behind ‘Im.

super idea. for your loyalty you shall be awarded an amapiano sub-board

I think the deal is that, as even Adorno recognized, you can't literally mass produce songs in the same way that you can mass produce bags of salt and vinegar potato chips - they still have to be distinct creative works that need to stand out and are heard as expressive or at least affective on some authentic level by listeners. (Obv you can mass produce CDs or mass distribute digital files but not the songs themselves. Ofc new flavours of chips or new packaging ideas are also developed but generally not as quickly as the number of songs released in a week.) 'Song factories' are ultimately only really factories in a metaphorical sense. So the tension between the industry's desire to control the product and market as you describe vs the nature of the product itself is what I think leads to the weird breakthroughs and surprises (even to the industry itself) and makes pop music interesting to the people who are interested in it. That said, it certainly still operates within limits and formulae and represents a narrow slice of the music that is out there, one that I think diminishes in interest for some of us as we get older.

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Saturday, September 3, 2022 4:50 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I wanted to come back to this discussion. Agree wholeheartedly. Nicely put about the weird breakthroughs and surprises even to the industry itself. Indeed the more control you exert, the more the deviations are going to stand out. You think you know what you're going to have, and then the end product looks like something else to the audience. That chase to pop perfection remains elusive, like waiting for stars to align. I like to think of pop as suspension of belief, a point of balance between manufacturing a calibrated product and true artistic vision, a realm of illusion. I am not sure if there is not an equivalent in every genre. Take folk, take jazz, every genre has its myths, every genre tries to capture something elusive. The process at play, the internal workings makes music interesting, not just the raw wild notes that Ornette Coleman hits. I'm not saying there is no difference between pop and the rest, there is. But all music involves a lot of control and ironing out, even when it doesn't feel that way.

What I find depressing in pop music is the image control and increasingly the message control. Also the dictates of trying to cover all bases by having one sad-but-hopeful songwriter ballad next to something dancy and uplifting next to ridiculous orchestration. Just copy-pasting formulas. But that's not inherently what pop music is.

Adorno was a great guy. Hopefully he would have been a belieber.

i wish there was a satisfying way of saying that I like the 1975 album and think Healy is an interesting, compelling pop star, songwriter and lyricist, but that i wish ILMers would devote like one eighteenth of the energy they do to analysing him and fuckin' taytay (okay and kendrick, who I love!) to other, less obvious stuff

can't we like, get deep into, idk, black midi, billy woods, idk, guess this is more a matter of what the people who like to get deep are into, and if that be the 1975 then so be it, be the change u want to see imago

i guess we're tiding ourselves over for certain seismic & imminent release dates

tired: 21st october
weyered: 18th november

shd have said 'weyeRD' lol

There’s not even an active Swift thread… your obsession w/her is bizarre, IMO (I don’t know the album’s release date by heart, and I’m looking forward to it)

i knewwwww i shd have scrubbed that bit from my post. please pretend i didn't write that bit

i mean the suppression of swiftalk is at least partly bc no songs are out and no one knows what the album sounds like

btw i am enjoying reading the 1975 analysis, i just wish more artists got the deluxe treatment!

or does only matty deserve it -_-

imago i promise to post in a billy woods thread if you start one

haven't listened to the new one yet, n.b.

Okay well I actually need to listen to his albums first too lol, it was an exaaaample

Let's start now tho

Pop music should not be “interesting” it should make your blood fizz like champagne or give you what feels like a mild electric shock

That sounds totally unpleasant, perhaps that’s why I think most pop music is absolute shit these days

I just meant it’s supposed to be visceral not intellectual or whatever

happy to talk about billy woods

more like billy goods

Have no idea who Billy Woods is, but if u start a thread I might read it

the thread where ilxors find out who billy woods is

you really don't all need to pretend the new jessie ware single (which i've unfortunately just listened to) is good

have some standards for your pop

I don't really know Jessie Ware all that well, but the first thing I noticed about Pearls is that the bass line is very similar to This Is What They Say by Carly Rae Jepsen (off of Dedicated Side B), and that's definitely a better song.

no shade but "Jessie Ware song sounds a lot like X" is basically the first step of listening to any of her tracks

ldr sux

I've never been able to get into an Angel Bat Dawid record.

same, despite my affection for almost everything on that label. To be fair, I almost always have hang-ups with vocals on any jazz record made after 1955

I think it's that the execution doesn't measure up to the high concepts for me

more like boregenius

(am I doing this right??)

I've never been able to get into an Angel Bat Dawid record.

this record wouldn’t be hyped by any of the sensible posters on ilm but god sleep token fucking sucks

at least something occasionally happens in a coldplay song. oooooh! punked u all etc

(have already more than said my bit about this album on RYM but being mentioned in the thread is too much to resist lol)

i was afraid you were going to dis my dick ... what a relief

i listened to a few tracks and put on Juliana Hatfield instead