This is a great interview. I could listen to Jack talk for days. I just love that you can tell he is actually as passionate about the music he works on as he says he is. I never get the impression that he works with someone for a paycheck, and it shows in the quality of the output.
I am in an extreme pickle here. I already have tickets for Paramore + Best Coast for the night they are going to be here. But... I already love the new Bleachers songs way more than the new Paramore album. I absolutely adore Tove Styrke. The Bleachers venue is smaller, general admission. Tickets are way cheaper for Bleachers. But I haven't seen Paramore in like, 5+ years while I've seen Bleachers many times recently. A PICKLE I tell ya
Honestly considered it, but there's just no way that I could ever get to San Diego on a weeknight. Google says it's a 4 hour drive right now, and I still don't get off work for another 3 hours.... so you do the math
Picking between Bleachers and Paramore sounds like my nightmare scenario. Those are probably my favorite 2 active bands. God bless you I can't even offer advice on this cus they both are so good live too.
Yeah Paramore is the cost of 2 Bleachers tickets. But at this point the price isn't a huge deal because I can definitely sell the Paramore ticket to a friend or on stub hub. Tickets are already pretty marked up on stub hub
we'll see if I can get Bleachers tickets tomorrow in the first place, last time I tried (granted, at a venue with 1/3 the capacity), I was unable to secure a ticket
Having never seen Paramore, I have no idea what their live show is like (especially with this album's era), but Bleachers BLEW ME AWAY when I saw them. Sooooo impressed with their live show!
It's less about them not liking it and more about the content of the review. Particularly lines like: "Other people's love always looks a little empty, a little too simple from the outside..." and "Antonoff’s feelings are valid — and they’re often relatable — and his big, open heart is in the right place, but Gone Now shows that without external voices and perspectives to temper and mold them, those feelings just don’t make for great music." Thesis statement: don't be open, earnest, and honest with your music. Write with co-writers that obfuscate your true experience. Write songs that don't reflect who you are and what you feel! And, honestly, fuck that shit. Music should be big, open-hearted expression. If you aren't telling me the truth, your truth, get the fuck out of here.
Yeah, totally agree that's just absurd. Also, not knocking people that use co-writers for music at all but something does rub me the wrong way at the thought of encouraging an artist to have others write and/or change their lyrics for them. It's like you said, artists should write their own stories how they feel about them, not put it to a team of outsiders meant to "temper" their feelings. WTF does that even mean.
That's not the thesis statement I'd take away from that review, or even that sentence. The author doesn't say "don't be earnest," just that it doesn't always work to be over-the-top earnest, and that it doesn't work here. I obviously don't know because I haven't heard the album, but I think this is the perfect type of negative (or semi-negative) review about something that I like (or will probably like) but I can still understand where it's coming from. Well-written review from a perspective I will most likely agree with. Enough posting reviews we disagree with and acting like it's a crime.
I don't think there's a sentence I agree with in that entire review. (And it's factually wrong: there's multiple credited writers and multiple composers on almost every song on the album.)
It is... not a good review. I sincerely believe my review is... a better review. It seems like that person went into the review wanting to hate the record and picked out every single thing they could imagine maybe disliking about it. The lena bit in goodbye isn't even very significant or loud in the mix and it's not even credited lyrically. I didn't even know it was her until this review and i also didn't know what she was saying at all. So the amount of effort necessary to dive that closely into that song just to trash it seemed kinda wild...
Co-writers are fine, and can often help to hone melody, lyrics, and song structure. They work best for me when it's someone like Jack, where you can always hear his vision at work even with other people on board. But the feelings and emotions of someone's music are the things that co-writers shouldn't "mold" or "temper." That's when you get albums that sound/feel like everyone else. Then make the point once and move on. Don't hammer at it over and over again for 800 words. I read it less as "here's a thing that doesn't work for me" and more as "here's why this artist should stop doing the thing that most defines their art and I'm going to repeat myself until you get it." I don't think it's a "crime" to write a negative review, and Jack definitely isn't the kind of artist where I'm going to get mad about anything negative anyone says about him. I like the first record, but it isn't a favorite of mine, and I haven't even heard this one. But the criticisms here irked me, and that goes way beyond this review. It's not a new thing for music critics to look on earnestness in music as unfashionable or embarrassing, and it's always bothered me. Yeah, that was odd to me. I didn't look at the credits or anything, but I figured there were collaborators.