Julia Holter

Does anyone know if the wingdings on the front cover say anything?

"Sweet in the melting world", it seems

Got an email a bit ago from Domino informing me that my digital copy of the album is now ready for download. That's a cool new thing that I don't think I've experienced before. Just tracked my package and it still says not expected to be delivered until Tuesday. Still at work for now, but at least I'll be able to listen to it over the weekend.

Holter's voice reminds me of Siouxie.

The way this is sequenced and the way the songs are structured is almost like a modern symphony. . . or, no: it's an opera!

So, as such things go, there's no way in HELL you can properly assess it after just one listen.

it sort of feels like an apocalyptic version of talk talk

i cant wait to listen to this

fuck it just starts like that, huh?

an apocalyptic version of talk talk

Where do I sign up?

Holy shit @ this album

This is challenging.

Can barely recall her previous albums. Now we're talkin'.

In many ways this album reminds me of Björk's Utopia: classical in its conception, rife with gorgeous trouvailles, but the whimsy and precious affectations are occasionally too much to bear (less so on Aviary, however, which is more varied timbrally). Still, it's hard not to be impressed.

I managed to listen to half of it yesterday and give it a (sem-distracted) full spin today, so I don't have really much to say other than that I adore it. Some early reviews had me slightly worried that it might be overly self-indulgent or impenetrable but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.

Let me just chime in on that note with my reaction after two, very full, very intense listens:

Honestly, the more I try to understand it, the less I do. Read lyrics; that made it worse. I mean, think about it: the lack of immediate musical repetition (and then, just at short intervals), seemingly nonsense lyrics, seemingly nonsense chords (+the combination of those two in unison), and oddly comforting moments of sheer beauty (the beginning portion of 'In Gardens' Muteness' and the whole of 'Words I Heard' are just stunning) make for an album that you could literally start at any point within the album's sequencing to give a first time listener a "starting point" and then run the album from there, with the portion you cut off the beginning now at the end, and they would have no other reference point.

All that is to say: it is an album nearly without context.

I'm aging myself perhaps here, however: I now honestly understand what people (usually baby boomers) meant when they said that some contemporary music was so foreign-sounding, but simultaneously intriguing, that it (usually Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead in the 60s) sounded to them like it was from another planet. Aviary is just that completely without context. Fucking rabbit hole of music. Wow.

Fucking meant worm hole.

*deep sigh*

Fuckin' whole goddamn analogy riding on that one thing.

Sheesh.

“Rabbbit hole” also works in a Lewis Carroll sense.

uhhhh ok i should check this out

an apocalyptic version of talk talk

This is 90 minutes!?!? Given that and all the praise in this thread I can’t wait to listen to this

I think the one word describing this album best at the moment for me is unfortunately suffocating.

i understand how people could find this album completely impenetrable, but i've found it the easiest of any of her albums to get into. i really wanted to like Have You In My Wilderness but something about the rhythmic sensibility, and the way the instruments fit together on it just felt awkward to me and i could never really get into it. Aviary on the other hand is so free-flowing and dense with sound that it's like a whole world to get lost in. the only place it really loses me is that 5 minute bagpipe drone at the start of Everyday is an Emergency. there's some fairly accessible songs on it hidden between all the drones etc. too

Listening to this album for the first time was the perfect use of the extra hour we were granted this morning.

Definitely worth splurging on a physical copy of this btw - both the vinyl and CD editions are beautifully packaged, and worth having the lyric sheet in front of you at least once while listening.

(nerd post)

For example, one lyric is an acrostic that appears to refer to this specific book. Not that knowing this makes the song any better of course.

A small point in response to those put off by the density of the music and arrangements: it is worth noting that this is addressed in the second half by the simple replacement of viola with violin, which gives the whole a lot more space to breathe.

( / nerd post)

i do like how it really bursts open with I Shall Love 2 as the finale to the difficult first side, and then the second side is a little more straight forward. it's like you've finally reached another world after a long journey

I shall love 2 seems like a continental divide. From then on the waters seem to flow into another direction. But somehow to get there is quite hard and i have not yet succeeded in listening to the 2nd half.

This is great! Every JH album is great in its own way, I'm not sure I get the sentiment that this is somehow her masterpiece or a big step up from HYIMW or Ekstasis. Early days though.

It's much grander in scope than its predecessors. I've managed to listen through twice. I haven't digested it, but I'm looking forward to getting to know it much better

OMG @ 'Les Jeux To You'.

This sounds awesome so far, closer to the kind of album I was ready for after Loud City Song. Every song seems to have at least a few moments as huge as "Maxim's I" ~0:56 or "Boy in the Moon" ~4:28.

i placed an order for this but haven't rec' it yet. is "underneath the moon" a roches cover?

*rec'd

I've only listened to this once and it's going to take a while to get to grips with it but I'd have to say it's her best work yet. She gets better with every album and there's not many artists you can say that about

After the first listen I was pretty much dumbfounded, and left with a sense that I had listened to something extremely dense, almost completely bereft of hooks, that doesn't make for easy entry, but also a sensational piece of musical exploration. I'm looking forward to getting further and deeper inside this record.

Nerdy fact: "Whether" used to be called "Heijinian" (and was based around staccato piano) when I first heard her play it live back in 2016. That night she also performed a slower ballad called "Where R U" on the setlist, but I don't remember it enough to match it to any of the songs on Aviary.

Keep the nerdy facts coming! I'm loving the allusions to women poets.

I need to listen to this a second time, but I felt like I was listening to a kind of Restorative School Of Magic counter-part to The Drift's spells of darkness and destruction.

Which is to say, both Holter and Walker have elected to create a style of music that, instead of composing songs with either already-existing or here-are-some-new-ideas approaches to melody/hooks/lyrics/whatever, they stop "writing songs" and push the very concept into the abstract-- thus the lack of hooks or melodies and the obliqueness of the lyrics-- to create a listening experience where the essential qualities of the material are found in the production and sonic composition rather than any "songs"

Hard to describe maybe? I'll listen a few more times and think about it more

i think the second side is pretty full of melodies, even if the vocals are a little pushed back in the mix

I am listening to this for the first time today, in a bit of an anxious mood and it isn't exactly soothing, but loving it anyway - should come back to it when in the right mood.

my LP just showed up and man no one was lying about the packaging, forgot it came with a signed photo too <3

this is fucking magnificent

Honestly cannot believe how stunning “Turn the Light on” is

every time i find myself thinking "oh the hooks have all disappeared i am in a wilderness of tones" a hook usually appears

i love this album

oh and yeah the back half is full of bangers i guess

Although every song on this is very different from every other song, I feel justified in saying that it’s like an entire album of songs like Jane Siberry’s “Bird In The Gravel”.

otm

I’m a bit afraid to listen to this as I feel very proprietary about Ekstasis and I don’t want this to be better.

Tim F otm a very specific and correct otm

Humbug.

Let Jeux To You HD good though

*Les