i also break from circa fan orthodoxy significantly by preferring blue sky noise to the first two records by a lot, sorry
I don't think that's as crazy as you would think. BSN definitely my favorite, but my next two are Juturna then On Letting Go
i hold this opinion sometimes. its basically tied with OLG for me, which are my top two...uhh... tied with the amulet? that doesnt add up but i stand by it.
BSN was my entry point and the only album of theirs I liked for like 4 years, and even then I didn’t love it. a few years later they ended up touring with Title Fight and PBTT off of Descensus and I loved both of those bands too much to miss the show so I gave their discog another listen and I swear to god Juturna hit me so hard it made me feel fucking crazy, like I didn’t have ears the last time I tried to give it a shot. been one of my favorite records ever since, it just transports me to an exact feeling and moment in time at this point. it was also like dead of winter at the time and it’s just an exceptional winter record imo so it kinda all fell into place. I like all their stuff to different extents but nothing ever struck me quite like Juturna, though I would say OLG is def next in line for me— I think they took their sound to the logical “next level” on that record, while still keeping the spirit very much aligned, tho some of the tightening up has a subtractive effect for me personally.
I found the band much later than most of y’all so I have a pretty weird ranking haha. My top 3 are Blue Sky Noise (by far), the new EPs and then Descensus
The first song I ever heard by the band was Only the Sun when it was posted on AbsolutePunk back in the day. After hearing it, I bought BSN and pre-ordered Descensus. Now it's next to impossible to rank their albums for me at this point. Like, I feel like they all kind of offer their own thing and none of them are really better or worse than others. Gun to my head, I think BSN remains my favorite, and Juturna is my least favorite, but that's as much as I can do.
Handshakes at Sunrise might still be my favorite track of theirs, and if I'm not mistaken, the first song/demo they ever released. It had such a massive impact on me when I first heard it on PureVolume.
i'm just so happy for them. these are such humble releases and are just so flattering for their overall legacy. so much grace and understatment while still absolutely HITTING
THE best moment by far of the whole damn thing. The most underrated moment imo in all of Circa has got to be YOU'LL TEAR OUT ALL YOUR HAIR I KNOW YOU WILL in I'll Find a Way. Literally fucks me up each and every time.
Blood from a stone from VW is my favorite track on that album. I think I’d love BSN if it was a little less produced. Not sure how to explain it but songs like frozen creek sounded better as demos to me. Everything feels a little too tight and structured.
That's exactly it. BSN sits at the bottom of my ranking because of this. I love it still, but it's their least interesting album because the production tries so hard to iron out the eccentricities of their song writing. The clipping is so bad. The remaster helped but it's subtle and not game changing or anything. I appreciate the album as a huge achievement, I just don't think it sounds very good overall. There's some sick moments but no single song on it is close to being a favorite.
BSN production is so bad, esp for these guys. It's just a strange record overall and falls into a stylistic no-man's land. They moved significantly away from the psychedelic, layered aura of the early work, but I'm not sure what it is they were hoping to move towards. Ends up sounding like the band of OLG taking what would've been their next Equal Vision release and merging it unenthusiastically with Big Label Radio Rock, with the production doing a fair bit of that work. I still like BSN a lot. It has some really good songs, bc Circa. But it feels compromised in a really unsatisfying way, and it will never stop being weird to me that it's the record that got them so many new, devoted fans.
iirc there’s a couple other similar ones, possibly anberlin also I always thought BSN’s production was great. The songs are a bit more bland in retrospect but it sounds great. Amulet, descensus, and violent waves sound the same to me. The music varies but they’re all near uniformly hard to listen to, with amulet being the slight best of the 3.