I really didn't like Ghost Story - felt like it disappeared up its own ass tbh and I really wanted to like it.
Song To Song I did not like... did a little review of it here.
It was definitely impressive from a technical standpoint, but as an actually good movie? Nahh... All the characters are stupid! There's no emotional resonance! But it is definitely fun in a roller coaster ride sort of way.
Oh shut up and go listen to these bands you definitely haven't heard of because you're too busy whining in the comments: https://www.stereogum.com/1968189/stereogums-40-best-new-bands-of-2017/franchises/list/
As our resident TWIABP supporter, I guess it's worth saying here that I'm pretty underwhelmed by Always Foreign. I wouldn't say it's bad or anything, but the best moments are just echoes of older songs and the rest is pretty unremarkable to me. But I'm sure a lot of people will be into it! I'm still excited to see where they go next.
I hear ya! YT wasn't available when it first went live, but it's up now so I just swapped it out. That's obviously our preferred embed (plus Soundcloud and Bandcamp) but sometimes the situation requires us to put Apple/Spotify embeds in until it surfaces elsewhere.
You should bring one of those small packs of Kleenex! And also listen to Pinegrove... what the heck!?!
Such a great bill, sad the tour is not coming anywhere near me.
Oh I actually agree with you! I haven't spoken this opinion in public outside of Slack, but I think a lot of 1989 has aged pretty terribly and I think a lot of that can be attributed to those "clunky but cute" moments which feel fun and good when swept up in a narrative but less so a few years removed. If Reputation is going to be a lot of those moments, I don't think Swift has the narrative armor this time around to withstand that.
I also like "Shake It Off"! But the rap breakdown is clunky as hell, but charming after continual exposure.
I'm a huge TSwiftie so I really want this to somehow turn around, but this single is the sorta shit that makes me doubt my faith.
I think the main problem with "Look What You Made Me Do" is that it simplifies Taylor's songwriting to a not-enjoyable degree. A lot of her choruses have always been super big and obvious, but they were balanced out by more flowery writing elsewhere. Here even the verses are undercooked and not detail-heavy so it makes the song ring really hollow. I think the actual meat of the hook could be catchy and work if there was some more vocal differentiation. But because Taylor isn't that emphatic of a singer, she can't do the whole "repeat the same phrase 10 times and have it sound different every time" trick. So it just goes nowhere. If there were more ideas stuffed into in the hook, I feel like she could pull something out of it, sorta like how she almost pulled off the rap part of "Shake It Off" just because her words were so dense. There's none of that here though...
Or, to pull from Jay Z's playbook, something like: "Look what you made me do, look what I made for you/Knew if I paid my dues, how will they pay you? When you first come in the game, they try to play you Then you drop a couple of hits, look how they wave to you."
But yeah, the single is a failure on a lot of levels. I'm still holding out a little hope for the album, but this is very worrisome.
Comments