This is fucking great. Serious AOTY contender for me already. I love the production a lot, and I missed Justin's vocals so much.
The live version from Eaux Claires is also mega-badass, you should definitely check it out
I do. The song is very pretty but I'm not too fond of the vocals so far, both the delivery and the mixing. The mixing of the vocals on the (previous) s/t is unfuckwithable. This still shows a lot of promise though, so I'm not getting my hopes down
This is the first time ever where I felt like an article about music should have had a spoiler warning.
I want to listen to this EP already so bad. so, so bad.
There is another honor, not known to most, but granted to a select few. That honor does not speak of momentarily greatness, but of a stature. In hushed voices, it is referred to as the Comment Party.
It just feels like that because it's a bit long. But it has more than a few. It has I Need a Forest Fire, Modern Soul, and it has fucking Timeless which is the banger to end all bangers.
Besides, it's not like he usually has hits, just a ton of earworms. I don't think the new one is lacking in those.
OH FUCK I DIDN'T WRITE ABOUT SEIGFRIED!! That song is a fucking marvelous gem. I'm waiting for the breath taking late-night performance that will crown it to as the next Bad Religion
I disagree. TLOP is great at what it does, and it's one of the albums I enjoyed the most this year (and probably the only one I know all the lyrics to)
I think RAM is overrated as fuck, but I wouldn't call TKOL or TLOP overrated. Those seem to be the albums that the stans of both camps (RH and Ye) seem to hold the lowest esteem of. And this is coming from a huge Daft Punk fan whose a Kanye Stan and a Radiohead cultist.
Pink + White is my favorite on Blonde (so far) and Decks Dark is my favorite on AMSP. Both are carried by a dominant bassline and both are placed as the third track. So there's that.
A few more words if I may, on Endless: Originally, I didn't like Endless very much. It felt way too-demoish, a mish-mash of great tracks and half-baked ideas, and it certainly didn't feel to me like an "album" as some have painted it to be. more like a teaser. (The fact that the visual was boring AF certainly didn't help). But I just finished listening to it for the first time since Blonde came out - and I like it a lot more now. It feels like it's consistent in it's sonic vision, and it flows greatly as an album - something which I feel Blonde is a bit missing.
I still don't understand putting a 7-minute track by another artist on a 45-minutes album, but whatever. It fucking bangs.
Feels kinda late in the comment section for a long-type comment, but here goes -
When Channel Orange came out, the only song I knew off of it was "Thinkin Bout You", which I liked a whole lot. However, I never got to listen to the whole album - I'm not a big R&B fan, and I thought for some reason the rest of the album would be similar to that song, so I just kinda let it slip and never got back to it for a long time.
It took some time (we're talking years) for me to actually get to listen to Channel Orange, and I immediately realized how stupid I was - the rest of that album is nothing like Thinkin Bout You. Most of that album is danceable, happy (in sound, at least), full of punchy production. It has SO MANY incredible drums. Those fucking drums! The drum parts and sound are my favorite things about Channel Orange. Which brings me to Blonde.
What I really wanted from Blonde is more of that. More crisp sounding hip-hop and R&B, more dynamics in sound. And it's not quite what we got. My favorites off the record - Pink + White (which is the best song on this album by a wide margin IMO), Nights (which is the closest thing to Pyramids on this album), and Nikes (which I disliked a lot when came out just 24 hours before the album) - all have those sounds, those dynamics. that crispness.
For me, the rest of the album is simply very thin. Frank's voice is beautiful, but the arrangements are just too sparse. There's too much empty space. There's so many places where I can hear additional drum and bass parts that would make these songs come to life, but they just sort of mellow out for most of the album length. That's not necessarily a bad thing - this isn't a bad album - but it just feels incomplete to me. Demo-ish, even. The sort of stuff that Frank plays for himself when preparing the bigger, world-conquering second album, only he decided to release those as the album instead.
I like this album more on every listen, but it isn't the major game-changer I hoped for. It has some HIGH high points. But it has too much filler and too less actual fully-fleshed SONGS. I can live with that. Hopefully the next album doesn't take 4 years.
tl;dr - Pink + White is way too fucking short so I'm overlooking the rest of the album
I read somewhere once that the reason for all those bonuses is that import CDs in Japan are much cheaper than the Japanese versions, so to convince the customers to buy those imports the record companies are adding bonus material
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