Tusk Vs The White Album

I feel like you two have this fight every day

xpost:

It basically sounds to me that you've read too many Beatle books/articles and let it colour your perception of the music. Most of the time what you're describing isn't what the music is, but more what you want it to be. You're reading stuff into it which isn't even there.

I guess Charles Manson did the same, though.

On a related note, you do sure fucking use the word "insane" a lot.

shakey - me too. I respect your opinion turrican but I fundamentally disagree with your constant assertion that art can be "objectively good" or "objectively bad." this shit is all subjective. it's fun to talk and squabble about preferences but there is no universal truth to the quality of any piece of art.

xxp my opinion and impressions of The White Album as stated were formed years before I read any Beatles books. the record has always freaked me out.

Well, I suppose that says more about you than the record!

thanks for the analysis, who do i make the check out to

The idea of someone listening to 'Don't Pass Me By' while looking out through their keyhole with a bead of sweat trickling down their brow absolutely tickles me. Sing it, Ringo!

Remove Bookmark from this Turrican

is there really a turrican or just a bot that posts "personally, i find this song rather silly" over and over again

Photo of Turrican:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f2/ab/b2/f2abb266763ceacca25065bff1af30c1--monty-python-funny-people.jpg

btw i agree w/ flappy bird, the white album has a very spooky feel to it. it's full of abrupt changes in tone and sudden transitions and songs that just sort of clatter to a halt, and things like "cry baby cry" or "revolution 9" or "happiness is a warm gun" or the bizarre outro to "long long long" do feel quite sinister. even "don't pass me by" sort of falls apart in a weird, chaotic way at the end. i don't think of it as horror-movie scary so much as the uncanny, unsettling feeling you might get from looking at an old abandoned house or reading about unsolved crimes late at night or something. much of that is due to lennon, whose nonsense stories and drawings also have a very menacing, lewis carroll-esque feel to them, full of barely-buried hints of violence and rage, and this feels like the album where that side of him comes out most fully. the only other songwriter of that era who gives me a similar vibe is syd barrett, but his vision was much gentler.

It's rawer and rougher than the direction they seemed to be headed in.. there's a real "the house lights have been turned on" unvarnished/atmosphere-less thing going on. or maybe it's just more like hanging out with them in someone's living room

Helter Skelter is totally scary from a musical pov, absolutely sealed by Paul's (?) off-key pitch-bending guitar thing.

xpost:

It basically sounds to me that you've read too many Beatle books/articles and let it colour your perception of the music. Most of the time what you're describing isn't what the music /is/, but more what you want it to be. You're reading stuff into it which isn't even there.

I know, I'm one to talk

the living room comment... I mean that it's more folksy and casual but also you're seeing them de-romanticized and with zits and bad breath and stuff

agree w everyone's "spookiness" feels for the white album. it reminds me a little of old cartoons where Donald Duck is going insane and is paranoid or something. difficult to explain but yeah the album captures a whole spooky attic feeling to it.

the ending of "Long Long Long" is super spooky, the scratchy guitar noise and drone, that ghostly wail...

yeah, i've long advocated for the white album as creaky old haunted house. not actively jump-scare scary but yes, something uneasy or curdled or sick. there seems to be a lot of emptiness around the instruments and vocals somehow, like they were all recorded late at night and the studio was kind of cold and there were footsteps in the hallway.

on when i get to the bottom i go back to the top of the WHITE ALBUM POLL i compared it to "mouldy old dough" and that still clicks with me, in that that song probably doesn't read as creepy at all to lots of people - just a jaunty little britisher throwback - but once i heard it that way, it was permanently the soundtrack for a bad-trip scene in an imaginary movie. a lot of the white album is like that, and i think that feeling is only heightened by the parts that aren't like that, the songs that are genuinely warm and fuzzy and blanket-like, or happy and encouraging and upbeat, while you're listening to them.

i've only just started listening to tusk recently and can't comment tbh. so far it just seems like a crowd of fragments and underwritten songs that will occasionally part to make way for something much more fully-realized. i don't have a problem with that idea but it reminds me of like, a compilation of TMBG "dial-a-song" numbers with each pushed to a full three-minute length.

Just you wait.

The ending on 'Long, Long, Long' is, what, less than 30 seconds on a double LP? There's that and 'Revolution 9', which I guess takes it up to 9 minutes. On a double LP.

Boredom with the record making process is the vibe that I mostly get from The Beatles as well as boredom with being a group and individual egos spiralling out of control - which is why there was next to no quality control, each individual thought everything they were writing was fantastic, and they can't-be-arsed rushed production. Spookiness? Fuck no. It's a better recorded version of Let It Be with slightly better songs.

*they=the

Boredom with the record making process is the vibe that I mostly get from The Beatles as well as boredom with being a group and individual egos spiralling out of control

Most of the time what you're describing isn't what the music is, but more what you want it to be.

yeah no - these sessions were labored over and there are tons of overdubs and stuff. not lazy/rushed, and anything that feels ragged or empty is imho a deliberate aesthetic choice after the pepper/mmt era. especially given that they were overflowing with material. some of it conveys a sense of glumness and exhaustion but that's because they had some heavy shit on their minds.

^ point exemplified by the cover, if Turrican's seen that

xxpost:

'xcept I am describing what the music is. Play the record back to back with, say, A Hard Days Night or Revolver and it speaks for itself. You can hear the excitement is there in the tracks on those records, and the quality control is there and the band are all going in the same direction. All of those things are absent on The Beatles.

There may be overdubs aplenty on portions of The Beatles, but quite a lot of it is sloppy as fuck, and still undoubtedly rushed, and quite a fair bit of the songwriting isn't up to snuff. You could say that in some ways The Beatles was a reaction against psychedelia, but c'mon it was 1968 and pretty much everyone who wasn't Small Faces (who released their psychedelic record a year late) were going "back to basics" ... but bands like The Stones were at least understood that if you're gonna go "back to basics", the songs better be good.

CD Player: "Well, somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccooooooon-ah!"

Random Beatles Fan: "Fuck, man!" *bead of sweat drips off their forehead as they shut themselves in their wardrobe*

Outc, listen to "albatross"

I'm open to discussing the different things people get out of this record but strawmanning the "scary" argument to mock the posters making it doesn't really encourage me to do that tbh.

Having a sense of imagination is fun

there's also something to be said for not being an intransigent moron who can't stop doubling down on it

people on this thread should be kinder

fuck you kinder doesn't need to be in every thread

quite a lot of it is sloppy

I don't really think so. There are intentionally sloppy things but they tend to be confined to song endings ("Bungalow Bill," "I'm So Tired," "Don't Pass Me By," the edits on "Helter Skelter" and "Yer Blues") or beginnings ("Revolution 1"). I don't think it's really the case with the song performances themselves or the production, unless we're talking about the two throwaways that Paul did himself ("Wild Honey Pie" and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road").

The production/mix on this record is quite shoddy in places, definitely.

quite quite, old bean

George Martin wasn't always around; the record's mostly self-produced.

flappy bird OTM throughout this thread.

you could take TWA apart, rearrange it, decontextualise it, critique its individual songs qua songs and argue (like Turrican) that there's nothing remarkable about it. Fact is, it exists as it does, as a first-of-its-kind genre-hopping double-album experimenting with a huge range of styles and textures following off the back of a series of increasingly idiosyncratic and musically border-pushing albums. And yes it is creepy and it is original and to people who care about the Beatles it is a great record.

I mean, Tusk has some lovely songs and Sara is beautiful and I love the riff on What Makes You Think You're The One, but it doesn't quite evoke that headlong, 'throw-it-all-at-the-wall and if it doesn't stick, keep it' rush that TWA does. It's a fairly safe-sounding record on the whole. 'That's All For Everyone' could be off The Beach Boys' 'Sunflower' album. The only time they get to being a bit daring is on the title track and it's not even the full song. Don't get me wrong, I like the songs and it is a classic but it's Rumours 'unpacked', innit?

If there's a 2018 remix of TWA (I think there will be?) it might do wonders for the clarity of sound but it might do away with the claustrophobia which I think is the source of creepy vibes that some of us are hearing on the otherwise throwaway or chirpy tracks.

There was a flurry of excitement after some comments by Giles Martin in June that suggested it was next - unfortunately he clarified that no, it's not happening. Idk I really hope he was covering his ass after spilling secrets.

Two 10/10 records, but it seems to me like anybody saying that only one of them (TWA) features some at-times-"shoddy" (or whatever) mixing has never even listened to Tusk. And certainly not on headphones. That's not a knock on Tusk, either!

George Martin wasn't always around; the record's mostly self-produced.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, October 30, 2017 4:07 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Indeed, and you can absolutely tell.

At least Tusk sounds like they spent a lot of money making it. The production team on that record really worked hard to make everything sound the best it possibly could, even on the Lindsey stuff.

this is like if geir became fixated on recording budgets instead of chord changes

Paul's stuff on The Beatles basically covers the same ground he would in his solo career. The token rocker, the token granny music one, the token acoustic ballad etc.

John and George's stuff is far narrower - mostly basic rock or blues with the exception of a couple of deviations from that.

lol Doc

xp

you left out token rocksteady jam

mostly basic rock or blues with the exception of a couple of deviations from that.

lol yes Revolution No. 9 just a "deviation"

"Goodnight" eh just a slight "deviation"

"Bungalow Bill" just another deviation

why am I bothering

the totally rocking blues progression of "Julia"

let's not forget poor Ringo's lone bluegrass contribution