Mitski

o me it's unrealistic to expect any sort of lithe agile arrangements around this vocal style. she also didn't use full band arrangements at all on P2, iirc everything was played by her or the producer. is it different on this one?

No. But I quibble about "lithe" and "agile."

i think i was just looking for the opposites of galumphing. her music is certainly squarely on-beat and i don't think it's supposed to be subtle--for what she's doing these are features not bugs.

holy fuck is a pearl incredible

Bit of an Elliott Smith vibe off it in the sense that it's extremely tightly constructed and constrained by the lack of live-band-ness. His songs too were very short.

If you really take in the full-bodied arrangements while letting the songwriting bounce you around the emotional register like paroxysms, I have no doubt that this album can be a powerful experience. The thing is that the songs demand that you are very easily enthused by that prospect.

Maybe it's me who is just emotionally stunted, but I never felt like anything here grabbed me and took me in. I felt like a had to submit in order to get on her frequency.

That is an interesting take.

i just think that if you don't like pop maximalism very much this probably isn't for you

idk i'll go through this track by track later

I don't feel like I had to work to enjoy this. It caught my attention right away.

Mine too. "Blue Light" is the only one I skip (at the moment).

some of y'all think way too much

I never felt like anything here grabbed me and took me in. I felt like a had to submit in order to get on her frequency.

this is how i feel about Mitski, also Hop Along, Paramore, most of the pop/rock/indie stuff ppl enthuse about here, and I think getting older is to blame for much of it

but man, when Geyser really kicks in at 1:20...that's a goosebump moment.

yeah if Geyser doesn't grab you then idk what to say

(I'm going to abandon ILX house style and do this like a RYM review, as is right)

track by track for all u neurotypical twats who don't get this exquisite aspie vibe (yes i just diagnosed mitski, w/e, it's my club too) (also obv u don't have to be aspie to enjoy this BUT IT PROBABLY HELPS)

geyser

gentle start with instantly queering touches like quietening organ drone, crazy glitch. no beats to even galumph over. slowly a tambourine enters, chords are lush. drums playing sparse 3-time beat. then suddenly the keyboards lurch in and the guitars and it's not so much galumphing as CRUSHING and SOARING at the same time, it is violent and the only way some people can process this is by saying 'oo er the drums and keys are playing every beat' but actually if u listen properly it's got a swinging sea-shanty beat, there's a canon between guitars and keys, there's a lot going on obv but u say it like she is just banging away like some teenage punk and that is bollocks, there is so much craft here

why didn't you stop me?

this might be the best track on the album (it's this or 'a pearl') and sure this one actually has a keyboard oscillation thru the whole song that by necessity plays every beat. i won't even bother to defend it except to say that the rest of the wildly varying instrumentation and contrasting sections build up into a beautiful and kickass quasi-britpop climax and u don't deserve mitski

old friend

this one has a slow, swinging beat that is constantly shifting time signature. it has an organ drone and sparse piano chords and the occasional keyboard flourish. oh but what about the guitar behind playing every beat please miss please please miss what about that guitar????!? well here's an idea why don't we ask kraftwerk why their songs needed a pulse to build around, the boring cunts! hey neu you're playing every beat! booooo

a pearl

this is just a fucking amazing song, nothing galumphing about it at all. it just sweeps over u so gracefully. lazy little drumbeat, then guitar explodes in, all while these long melodic phrases unwind at their leisure, then guitars explode in even harder playing these unearthly droning notes as everything gets echoplexed to fuck while still sounding laconic and resigned i mean what are you listening to

lonesome love

another shuffling lazy beat w/ same acoustic strum pattern, obv a country pastiche but takes this really dark turn for its iconic chorus which it does not repeat because it doesn't have to

remember my name

ok this one has some sort of treated guitar playing every beat, along with the bass and the drums FAIR PLAY YOU GOT HER THIS TIME. it's also a fantastic song w/ loads of lovely subtle touches. u have me riled. i mean i'd hardly call this 'galumphing', it moves quite slyly. the palette is intense but the execution is sophisticated

me and my husband

this is the one that sounds most like 'penny lane' or blur or w/e. it's a superficial similarity, call and response low and high notes, but it still has that shuffle and laconic attitude seen in almost all the tracks here. occasional organ flourish. other keys low in the mix. beautiful song.

come into the water

this is a little ambient folk-pop exercise fgs

nobody

galumphing discopop & the only track matt dc can remember. oh and the insistence is obv deliberately playing against the desperation of the lyrics and the melody i mean sure this isn't for u but it's not trying to be straight disco so please don't treat it like she ruined a potentially good song

pink in the night

another ambient pop exercise that plays around in the lower registers of your mind. loads of space in the mix. loads of long-held notes. when the martial drumbeat comes in it plays off that space and texture. it is an aesthetic and it's done so well

a horse named cold air

this song doesn't even have drums, just some really sparse piano chords and keyboard washes. i don't like it as much as the other tracks cos it sounds like 'pyramid song' too much but it is a nice pause for reflection. obv to call this 'galumphing' will see u laughed out of the room

washing machine heart

oh god no no oh god it's ANOTHER KEYBOARD PULSE THAT GOES ON ALL SONG! run and hide! shit the drums are doing it too! aaaaah! and there's more keys, but they're syncopated! and a guitar playing some lovely subtle chords! and she's singing a heavenly melody! what is this bastard mix of galumph and elegance?! why cant i handle it? (third best track btw)

blue light

here's that swinging, shuffling beat she used earlier (on 'lonesome love', fact fans!) but this time it's even sadder and stranger, the melody starts strong but almost immediately gets swallowed up in echoes and keyboard washes. the song retreats, hides, is lost. i think that's beautiful myself but maybe you're still listening to see if the drums are playing every beat (they're not)

two slow dancers

this song galumphs about as much as you'd expect a song called 'two slow dancers' to. there's a pulse that goes on the whole time, but it only plays one beat per bar (throughout the album, pulses playing against non-pulses has been a key part of the songwriting aesthetic). fun detail: the keyboards, when they flourish the first time, shift from playing on the beat to this perfectly woozy syncopation, echoing mitski's intonation of 'we're just two slow dancers'. it's genius

anyway i only did this because i fucking hate lazy criticism and to see it coming from a sitemod is doubly depressing. peace

was there a way to do that without being a dick at the end

the ending was more facetious than hostile tbh, i do not mean any malice

i just think that if you don't like pop maximalism very much this probably isn't for you

― imago, Wednesday, August 22, 2018 1:02 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is strange -- I like this album but besides "Geyser" and possibly a couple seconds of "Nobody" nothing about this album is maximalist at all, it's very low-key and mid-range emotionally.

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