Julia Holter

I feel the same and its a blessed relief when the luxurious sound of "I Shall Love 2" comes around

I've only listened to this album twice though tbf so it'll take a while for its charms to become apparent

“A bit too extra, for imago” should be the sticker on the album cover

it still makes zero sense to me that lj doesn't like her

i mean i get it but also when i listened to this record i thought "maybe this is the one for lj" :(

To my mind, there was at least a 75% chance that he would proselytise for it but the quarter won out.

I'll certainly listen to it again, as much to work out why it doesn't work for me as to try and get something out of it

I think I liked the short second track as well tbf. I'm not sure she can pull off things that aren't pop. Talk Talk feels like a really big stretch

Talk Talk is just the easy reference point people immediately reach for when they hear music with woodwinds and a sort of hushed atmosphere, it doesn't sound like Talk Talk to me.

It's like when people compared Field of Reeds to Talk Talk and it's just like, Jesus, listen to other music!

there’s way more space and delay on talk talk records, this is v composed and full and constantly thrumming

there’s a lot of space on this record too but imo it’s used very differently

haha I made the exact connection to field of reeds when reading this thread! Not so much the talk talk thing as the general casting around for reference points, just felt similar to me.

There's a lot more repetition on Talk Talk records as well, this is almost constantly roving into new areas.

much of this fell straight into my kaitlyn aurelia smith 'saying little with a lot' unhappy place tbh, if you want a comparison you'll probably find more flattering or accurate. something about lush maximalism

i think she's saying quite a lot, the experience of the record is like a brain unloading itself (or, true to its title, like being in an atrium of squawking thoughts)

admittedly this is a quality shared by most of my favorite records this year (the mewithoutyou record lyrically is like a brain unloading itself)

The title is the cherry on top of the “huh lj doesn’t like this”

speaking of titles, she and KAS have the same irritatingly arch way of titling things too. 'ekstasis', 'euclid', 'i would rather see', 'i am curious, i care'

This is fascinating so far. Full of surprising turns.

and yeah I'm sure she's saying plenty. I just can't hear any of it. I'm saying 'it's not you, it's me' this time

Don't much care for KAS for the very reasons you mention, yet I enjoyed my first encounter with Aviary – its maximalism did not strike me as an empty form carefully concealing itself.

love JH but this was a racket for me on first listen

I'll give it another chance now/this evening

fgti was otm upthread when he compared this to Scott Walker's late works, a far apter point of comparison than Talk Talk.

This is going to be fun to explore. I feel like this is the music I've been waiting to hear this year.

vinyl feels like the right format for this record, the chunking helps it feel less oppressive

also just on a selfish consumer level, I appreciate a double LP that's actually the length of an old-school double album

May have to double down on some of my criticism. Chaitius which I'm enduring right now is basically high-budget muzak with some terribly affected echo-mumbling on top. I cannot begin to see why she'd release this. And the the big melodic change-up is...an ascending scale. The melodies are just nothing

I think the Scott Walker comparisons stem from the horns bit in Everyday Is An Emergency ripping off that one bit in Clara. The comparison sort of tanks after that though as Walker was all about vivid juxtaposition whereas this all feels like its trying to goo all its textures together

YOU'RE a gooey texture!

ILM's biggest Jyte Gyte fan: sorry guys, this is too much for me.

I feel that misrepresents my criticisms

I'm only joking. No insult intended

OK the first song to save me from distress is maybe In Gardens' Muteness

the beginning of the bangers

imago is a pointilliste.

I had to pause due to work but I did like that song. It ditched all the gooey echoey muzak nonsense and tried to actually yknow be a song or whatever rockist pointillist thing I believe in

Will listen to the rest presently

So yeah, there are (imo) two good songs, and they both sabotage themselves because JH has seemingly no sense of momentum, or when she has a good thing on her hands. In Gardens' Muteness is really good for about five minutes, then the climax of the song is this clunky one-note piano thudding that sort of works but I'm sure wasn't the best way for it to go. And then - worse - Les Jeux To You (these fucking TITLES) actually hits an awesome art-rock groove - like, after so much flimsy muzak, something with purpose! - and then instead of riding with it to the stars as she threatens to, she just abandons it and returns to the muzak for no apparent reason. I just can't deal with it. If it was just those two songs then I could deal with it as a good but flawed single but today I've sat through this album for three full hours and gawped at its RYM average score and wondered how everyone's brain is wired up compared to mine with increasing alarm. What is wrong with me/you?

idk man maybe it's bc you keep referring to it as muzak

TS: clocks or clouds.

Chaitius which I'm enduring right now is basically high-budget muzak with some terribly affected echo-mumbling on top.

idk are you listening to the bass in this track? the tightly turning strings that make up the first part of it? the silence it drops away into leaving her uttering clipped unintelligible syllables in empty space? "muzak" feels intentionally distancing

extremely LJ titles on this (e.g. les jeux to you)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNOTz3M-gbQ

^ this film is useful if you haven't seen it and are wondering what holter's intentions were

imago, what's your opinion on I Shall Love 2? That's the hit for me.

sounds like spiritualized badly covering joy division but then the last 30 seconds are good

also if you can get through that video with a straight face then i don't know how to help you

I love Have You in My Wilderness a lot, but I’ve never really gotten into any of her other albums. I think I will not be in a hurry to give this a listen.

sounds like spiritualized badly covering joy division but then the last 30 seconds are good

Oh Icarus.

It is both hilarious and predictable that after literally years of playing musicological pin-the-tail on the donkey every time you want to elevate an artist you like over one you don't, when you're confronted with an artist at least adjacent to the indie rock mainstream making highly composed, ambitious, dense and yes in places microtonal music - and a classically-trained artist who knows what she's doing at that - all you can think of to do is term it "muzak" or reach for the most off-the-peg "art-rock" reference points imaginable.

It's almost like your entire schtick was hot air all along and now you're trying to belittle the music to try and deflect that. It was better - and more honest - when you just admitted you didn't understand it or didn't like it. (I don't understand it either but happily I at least I like the noise it makes).

His dislike of ambient music is remotely relevant here. I also get the sense that 'atmosphere' is not a category he's interested in for its own sake – it ultimately boils down to narrativity (albeit of the bizarre and non-linear variety), hence his insistance on 'songwriting'. Anyway, props for your commitment to genuinely unpopular opinions, imago, I'm personally a fan even when I disagree (p.s.: Black Dresses are quite cool on the purely instrumental front, but I can't stand the singing at all, at least in the absence of fountains of youth).

Maybe but I don't get the sense (at all!) that this record is about atmosphere for its own sake. There's clearly a narrative here, the songs keep moving forward and rarely revisit previous territory, in a way that is obviously going to frustrate a lot of listeners who were brought up on pop or rock music and like repetition and easily identifiable structures.

What it isn't particularly interested in offering are those cathartic rock moments (and even most of what is usually termed 'art-rock' tends to rely on those moments as well) where everything *kicks in*, probably the big thing that someone would get out of These New Puritans or even later Radiohead and not this, for example. It shares that with a lot of ambient music obviously but also a lot of post-war notated music.

I could provide literally hundreds of examples of non-linear unrepeating music that I love - and just as many examples of music that offers non-obvious catharsis. And it's not like this album doesn't have builds or climaxes. I'm just not sure it handles any of those things in a way I like.