FKA twigs

there's little to no use of dynamics, her voice sounds wispy and distant, all the songs are basically the same tempo, the instruments sound like ableton presets, it's heavily produced, and every song mines the same depressed/wistful emotional palette

although i have to say i read the lyrics online the other day and they're really great on paper, don't feel them as much when listening though

and her dancing is straight fire beautiful tbf

there's little to no use of dynamics, her voice sounds wispy and distant, all the songs are basically the same tempo, the instruments sound like ableton presets, it's heavily produced, and every song mines the same depressed/wistful emotional palette

^see that's kinda why i like it tbh

there's little to no use of dynamics

don't agree with this at all. or maybe it's true in the strict sense, but there's a great use of rhythmic density (constantly shifting from very dense to very sparse) that feels very dynamic and alive.

"Glassy and sterile" is just such a weird way to describe an album that most listeners have been noting for its warmth and it's sensuality? OK, there are moments that are so blatant in their desire that they make me squirm a bit, but at the same time the urgency feels really honest, emotionally. (I like music that focuses on women as sexual subject, rather than sexual object.) Distant I don't get, either. Wispy, sure, but there's so much of it that is so up in your ear like a tongue. I could understand the criticism that at times it's almost too sexual/sexualised to the point where it seems almost too obvious, but this whole distant / depressed / glassy / sterile is like... what? This album is *dripping* with desire.

I get that it is very much all of a mood, and all of a piece, sonically (though I agree with Jordan that the contrast of density with *space* provides the dynamics) but to me, the sonic cohesion just heightens its impact as an album, a work of art, the coherence and fully realised completeness of her vision. That might grate if it were longer, but it's short enough that the deliberate focused intensity is part of the appeal. It is a self-contained and cohesive world, by choice. Honestly, that heightens the appeal.

(But I suppose even just saying that plays into the "it's about SEX!" trope or something. Sigh. Because Sex is such an off-limits topic for pop music and all.)

see, I disagree; I think this is largely people reading things into the music from the lyrics that simply aren't there. goldenheart is a useful comparison point, because listening to something like "tug of war" or "frequency," *those* are dripping with desire, are very much subject as opposed to object and feel exciting to listen to. whereas listening to, say, "two weeks," the vocal tone, delivery and mood sounds like a high-school choral recital; you could functionally replace any dumb lyric about thighs or whatever with "ave maria" and have it come off exactly the same.

also, name one place where I have ever said sex was an off-limits topic for pop music. obvious or not! if anything, what this album needs is to be 1000% more obvious in its delivery.

Wow, choral recitals must have changed since I was at school!

Seriously, Goldenheart, as much as I love it, is over-long and over-blown and a thousand years long and sounds like a war (which is actually the point, I get that!) But that is a record it took me a long time to love, and repeated listenings while LP1 grabbed me on the first listen. It feels like a false equivalency to set up those two records because they do such different things.

If you don't like it, you know, you have the right to not like it, that's why there's chocolate and vanilla, but your criticisms just sound mystifying to someone who does like it. Like you've already decided just to hate it because it's ~British~ and ~trendy~ or whatever and you're just going to throw a bunch of adjectives and false equivalences at it to justify an instinctive dislike.

I haven't just decided to hate it because it was trendy -- I've listened to everything she's recorded well before this album was even close to coming out. I thought "Water Me" was basically OK (I think I compared it to Worm Is Green when I first heard it), but nothing more than OK; it seemed like an album track. "Papi Pacify" was a throwaway, and it's telling that almost every time people mention it they quickly skip past the actual music to get to the video, as if vaguely submissive foreplay is supposed to be a shocking image in 2013. maybe at some point I was put off by the stage name, but there are artists with worse stage names who are among my favorites.

as for the album proper, I don't even hate it! 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. Not all of "Goldenheart" has anything to do with this -- that's one of the reasons why I like it more -- but the songs in which Richard does LP1's thing, she blows it out of the water. But maybe we need to get away from R&B -- it was always a weak comparison anyway (and leads to people like Banks being mentioned in the same breath, which, no). Every trip-hop vocalist in existence has recorded an album along these lines, most of which get ignored. The closest match is likely Nicola Hitchcock on "Passive Aggressive." (Except that album suffers from the opposite problem -- LP1 ropes in Haynie and Epworth and makes them all blend into nothing, whereas Hitchcock had something like nine separate producers doing their own things, and it sounded inconsistent.) Or from last year, Goldfrapp's "Tales of Us" has more sensuality in any given four words than most of this entire album -- although I only know one person who agrees with me on this, and she's not a music critic. I could go on to mention tons of people -- Rebecca Collins and Laura Sheeran and Karoline Hausted and lots of other people that it feels slightly unfair to mention because they're lesser-known but who do basically this, IMO better.

i think you're selling the creativity of the production short, this feels like Yeezus in terms of bringing together sounds and ideas that have been bouncing around the electronic music underground (for lack of a better term) and putting them in a pop album context, and making it all sound pretty amazing.

i agree that she is pretty zeitgeisty and that's a rare intangible. it's just not one that necessarily comes with quality guaranteed c.f. yeezus

I disagree that there's next to no dynamics on this, her vocals are pretty hushed throughout but the production is all about the juxtaposition of light and floaty and rough and clanky. I didn't really appreciate it until I listened to it loud on good headphones though.

I received an email that was very upsetting to me and I just wanted to clarify something. I did not mean to hurt anybody's feelings or to shit on anyone's enjoyment of anything. It gives me no joy to feel differently about an album than the consensus; in fact, it does the precise opposite, because there is the risk of something like this happening.

I'm sorry.

god, I wish there was a way to word this that sounded less awful. I genuinely am sorry. I'm sorry for any feelings that were hurt (I know that sounds vague and/or evasive, but I don't know who to apologize to personally or what to apologize for specifically, or else I would.) I'm sorry I don't like the album. I wish I did more. I was under the impression that threads here were for discussion in general, whether positive or negative, but if that was the wrong impression to have I apologize for this too.

not from someone on this thread? i thought you were very polite about yr feelings about the album, and gracious to write so much grappling w/ why you don't like it

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.