the 1975 - a brief inquiry into online relationships poll

There's also other factors to consider when compiling an album - things such as crossfades and gaps between the tracks. For mine, insert about 2 seconds of silence in between 'Sincerity is Scary' and 'How to Draw / Petrichor', crossfade the sounds at the end of 'Inside Your Mind' with the sounds at the beginning of 'It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)' for a more seamless transition, and add about 3 seconds of gap between 'It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)' and 'I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)' ... I wish I could swap the opener for a better version of it, but given that's what they came up with then it is what it is.

(xxpost)

Here's a hot take: imo this album is perfectly sequenced and its gradual descent into softness is one of its best features

Actually, no. Remove Be My Mistake and then it's perfectly sequenced. Before the full album came out and i'd just play the early singles on repeat, the transition from Love It If We Made It to Sincerity is Scary always worked so well. Also Be My Mistake sucks.

I like 'Be My Mistake' ... the only criticism I can level at it is that the arrangement is so bare that you can't help but focus on the lyric, which isn't one of Healy's best, and he isn't a great lyricist to begin with. Otherwise, it's quite pretty and far from the bland elevator muzak of 'Mine', which is some Harry Connick Jr. style shit direction which I hope is gone completely on the next album.

resequencing records is not interesting

15. "I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)" 3

This song deserves better. One of the best 3 songs on the album, along with the two that placed highest in this poll.

that one blew me away at first but then i cooled on it, likely because it’s the one that most betrays their well-hidden blurophilia

I was listening to the album tonight and I realised that 'I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)' and 'It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)' are the only moments on the album, for me, where they sound like a band. A lot of the rest sounds like it was either written from scratch or pieced together on computer, or a Healy solo performance was recorded to Pro Tools and overdubs were applied to that ('Be My Mistake', 'Inside Your Mind') ...

... I have to say, I'm not taken with some of the production/mixing on this record. Their first two albums - particularly the second - sound really thought out in the production department, but something like 'Give Yourself a Try' - even though I like it as a song - sounds like it was thrown together "in the box".

Not that there's anything wrong with the approaches they used to create, say, 'TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME' (on one hand) or 'Inside Your Mind' (on the other), but on their next record I'd like to hear them be more of a band.

I would definitely appreciate a little more thematic cohesion in the next record

I like a couple of the zero-vote-getters on this poll ("Be My Mistake" especially), but generally speaking, they are spot on.

I will always lean toward "give us more and we can ignore/tolerate the stuff that's not up to par" as opposed to "release 9 songs every 5 years" (especially early or in a particularly fruitful period of a career) BUT I do hope that at some point someone in this band decides/learns to cut the weaklings and gives us a perfect 10-to-12-track album.

I dunno, I'm listening to I Like It When You Sleep... again now, and even though it's 74 minutes long it's just breezing by. I think it was LJ that said that even though A Brief Inquiry... is a shorter record, it actually feels longer. I definitely agree with that. I love how rich and detailed the production is on I Like It When You Sleep..., too. It sounds like they were very focused making it. The first album actually plays like a Greatest Hits to me now that I'm willing to overlook how ropey Healy's vocals are on it at times.

I don't disagree with any of that ... Sleep is a better, more focused album than the newer one, imo. But I still think there are 3 or 4 songs they should've/could've cut from Sleep.

Yeah - I mean, they could have cropped 'Nana' and 'She Lays Down' off and had the album end on 'Paris' and I wouldn't have minded. Or cut 'Loving Someone' ... but I dunno, I'm glad they're there. I Like It When You Sleep... feels like a very generous record that I can't get enough of, whereas A Brief Inquiry... feels like too much.