Leaving aside the difference of opinion, I definitely didn't intend for my review to make any "promise of big hooky anthems," so I apologize if I misled you there.
I'm pretty conflicted about Baroness and I genuinely love a lot of the last two albums -- the first single off Purple is the best song they've recorded to date IMO -- but that was just brutal honesty on my part: When I heard Yellow & Green, I thought, "This is not as good as Red or Blue, and based on the direction they're headed here, I don't think they'll make another album better than Red or Blue." And Purple didn't change the way I felt. I'm not bailing on them, and I'm sure they'll do plenty more stuff in the future that I love, but my expectations today are lower than they were after Blue. It kills me to say that btw. That said, even if you agreed with my feelings about Baroness (or I agreed with yours), I'd still encourage you to judge for yourself on Pallbearer as opposed to just reading my review and NOT forming your own opinion. I'm not The Official Final Word On Music over here. Pallbearer did all the work, I'm just shouting about how much I love it.
I LOVE Wolverine Blues now, but when it came out, it was not exactly what any Entombed fans wanted from Entombed. It seemed real goofy and like it was trying way too hard to be something different and kinda dumb. But honestly at this point I probably like it just as much or more than the first two.
Yeah I'm thinking it's a combination of a bunch of those things. His voice is fucking ridiculous all the time, but he's almost on some Mike Patton shit on this album, and I think maybe all those crazy shifts are throwing you or something. I dunno, man. I hope you connect with it, though!
Actually I guess "Cruel Road" has a chorus, too, technically speaking, and certain motifs are threaded into certain songs in different ways, but when you listen you'll maybe get a better idea of what I mean about the structures. If you diagrammed out these songs they'd look like city maps or something.
Man, I don't have that reaction to the vocals at all. Maybe it's because he's doing so many different things with his voice (texturally speaking + multilayering, etc.) and it's all going through different processors or something? I honestly think the production on this album is pretty close to perfect, and the vocals absolutely blow me away. This is easily the best he's ever sounded to my ears, so maybe it's just a taste thing? But his vocals are always my favorite element of their sound, so I sincerely don't know why it sounds that way to you.
Nah, you're right, which is why I threw in qualifiers like Krallice and Sunn O))). I could have explored this more thoroughly in the review, but I was singling it out here because I think it's pretty striking in the context of this particular music, which is very melodic and seems like it should adhere to traditional structures. And typically, it would. Doom in particular (and post-metal, too, and even some "atmospheric" black metal) is really riff-based or rhythm-based, so even if there's not a "chorus," per se, the songs are deeply rooted in repetitive themes that give them a sort of hammering or droning hypnotic quality. But this album doesn't do that at all. The songs are constantly moving forward and changing shapes, doing something totally different than they were a minute earlier, but they still feel like *songs*. This one track, "Dancing In Madness," is almost 12 minutes long, but it takes so many unexpected compositional turns that I find myself hanging on every second of the thing, and then it's over in a span of time that feels to me like a lot less than 12 minutes. I might not have done a great job of making it sound unusual, but I can honestly say there aren't too many other bands who do what Pallbearer are doing here.
I think you might be applying the transitive property a bit too liberally here. I'm saying: "Weezer's recent work has been good enough for me to give them the benefit of the doubt and accept this mediocre song, partly because if nothing else it appears Rivers Cuomo can still at least write hooks and sing pretty well." I am NOT saying: "I'm happy to see Weezer producing mediocre work in this particular vein because I'm secretly a fan of similar-sounding mediocre bands." (To be fair, I don't know 21 Pilots well enough to call them mediocre. I do know they are INSANELY popular, and I also know that I haven't liked what little I've heard from them.)
This coding error should now be amended, so your comments will no longer be italicized and will, sadly, make no sense to future generations of Stereogum readers. To those readers, I say: There was a coding error, and it was amended. Thanks to the above commenters for the heads up(s)!
See, this is exactly why they shouldn't have released these "singles" and should have just dropped the album. Like, the scale is totally off. Dan, I wouldn't begin to try to "tell you" what you're hearing (or not hearing), but I suspect your reaction is, in part, because of the songs' structures: Nothing repeats. Most songs are verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus, right? Something like that anyway. That's why they stick, the repetition. But for the most part, that's not how THESE songs are built: they're not circular, they're linear. That makes perfect sense -- and works perfectly -- over the course of the album (that's what I was trying to get at with that Kubrick thing I mentioned in my little review), but it leaves decontextualized songs sounding a little unnatural and maybe incomplete, even if you're not sure why. I'm not promising you'll love the album -- it's a truly singular and uncompromising work of art, and that means it probably won't appeal to everyone's tastes -- but I will promise that when you hear it in full, these little units will make more sense. FWIW, I was a big fan of the first two albums (LP1 better than LP2, agreed), but I can't imagine going back to them now, unless it was for the sake of nostalgia or trying to find the building blocks that led them to this place. Pallbearer used to be a really good doom band -- a great example of the genre -- but they've blown way beyond that. Of course YMMV, that's just my 2 cents -- on which I will expand whenever I write a PE (which, I should tell you, will probably include some of what's written in this comment, perhaps verbatim).
This is hardly the ONLY example of Biggie's profound impact, but it's a good one: Biggie Smalls is Lin-Manuel Miranda's favorite MC of all time. As far as I'm concerned, Hamilton is the most impressive and important work of art of my lifetime. You're free to disagree with either/both of those opinions (I'm guessing you DO disagree) but it's not unreasonable to suggest that without Notorious B.I.G. we'd never get Hamilton. It's totally insane to suggest that "No one even talks about Biggie other than on shit like this," because, like, people everywhere talk about Biggie all the time, and there's plenty of evidence to prove beyond a doubt that he's a "lasting force."
I should confess that the "left-leaning" modification was added by me in an edit of this piece, and the change was made only in an attempt to clean up the line a little bit. The original draft had no such partisan qualifier. Indeed, the right absolutely caters/panders to the "most marginalized" members of its base; I just didn't think Austin was referring to the politics of the right in that sentence. But if I erred in my reading or misled any readers, I apologize. That one is on me.
I would imagine it's not in this column because they haven't released a second single yet. I'd say that if you like Pallbearer in general, I'll be pretty surprised if you don't like the new album a whole lot. Idk what people are saying about it on Twitter or Reddit or dB or fucking MetalSucks or whatever, so my opinion isn't in any way affected by what anybody else has written -- I am fully removed from the echo chamber -- and I think it's pretty much unparalleled, if not an instant classic. It sounds weird for me to say all that and then say "ignore the hype," but you can safely ignore the hype; the album obliterates anybody's opinions.
Yeah it goes hard as hell, and it's engaging pretty seriously with the subject matter. There's some stuff in there that even hard-lefties/DemSocialist types have trouble talking about or dealing with. The music reminds me of Suicidal Tendencies, old NYHC brawlers like Judge or Biohazard, even Slayer. I go back to LP1 with Body Count (back to OG-era Ice-T actually) so I'm in a weird minority on Stereogum, but man I listened to this thing like a hundred times today, it's some of the only music I've heard this year that makes any fucking sense.
Green Day was the answer. The question was: What band used to be called Sweet Children? I was very lucky to be on a really good team. I didn't deserve to win.
#actually we won three grand, $500 per player. The $500 I won will cover a fraction of the amount I spent to see Hamilton last year, which I mention only because my sole meaningful contribution to my team's victory was knowing the names of the Schuyler sisters (Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy, duh).
It's not easy for us to get together because Aaron and Ian live really far away from me, Doug, and Wyatt. Doug's girlfriend once took a pic of all of us minus Ian, and if we put a bunch of filters on it, it would probably look something like the one at the top of this post. Without the filters, we look like a bunch of Bernie Bros who just finished a tour of the Ommegang Brewery.
My apologies. It was a long essay, and at the time I wrote it, I was still grappling with whether I would (or could) continue to be an active proponent of a culture whose values and views are way-too-often in direct conflict with my own. Here's the line in question indicating that I might be done:
If [my consternation] makes me unfit to write about metal anymore — and maybe it does — then so be it. I can’t say I’ve done more good than harm here. I’m OK walking away from this battle, because there are plenty of others that need soldiers.
In the days following that essay's publication, I devoted some serious thought to my dilemma and finally decided it would be hypocritical and ultimately harmful for me to be a part of this collective effort going forward. I love Doug, Ian, Aaron, and Wyatt like brothers, and it's hard to imagine I'll ever feel otherwise, but I took a good hard look beyond our little crew, and a good hard look in the mirror, and I didn't like what I saw. Some of this stuff is the big, obvious shit that we all know about; some of it has occurred in private conversations whose contents will remain private; some of it is because I suddenly found it hard to distinguish myself from a growing group of mealy-mouthed weenies who vacillate between complicity and conscience but are ultimately too craven (and opportunistic) to choose a side. I don't stand with those people. I don't wanna stand anywhere NEAR those people. That's not to say I'll never write about metal again in any capacity (I'm sure I will), just that I no longer feel comfortable being an "ambassador" for the genre. I've done more harm than good. And I don't want to distract from the healthy and constructive conversation that occurs in this space, so I left.
Wait wait I'm not leaving Stereogum or anything, just not doing Black Market anymore. But I only contributed a tiny percentage to the column on a monthly basis, so it won't really change that much if at all. But yeah, no need to say farewell or anything, this is still my full-time job!
I wrote a whole bunch about it here and here, both of which you maybe already read. I don't know if I'll write about it again anytime soon, but no question, it's the album I've listened to more than any other in 2017. Absolutely essential.
I kinda hate when journalist-types hype up a record before it's available to the public, so I've refrained from talking about this one on Twitter or whatever, but since the first single is out, I just wanna say: I've been listening to Heartless for a little while now and I think it's kind of unparalleled. "Thorns" is the shortest song on the thing, which is probably why it's the first single, but it doesn't come close to conveying the breadth and scope of the album. It's truly fucking magnificent -- a huge leap forward from the first two IMO. I'm stoked to talk about it with everybody once everybody can hear it.
Haha thanks for your concern. Butthurt? Man, the country is in seriously dangerous, totally uncharted waters after FIVE DAYS of Trump in office. Get the fuck outta here with your "butthurt" shit. Also I didn't write this story but I'm sure Tom will appreciate that wrestling reference.
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