Jigsaw and Shinrin-yoku are crazy goated feels wild but TTTS is both a genre classic and their seventh best album for me, it's aged not amazingly well. vocals are truly tough to hang with at times and the last track is probably my least favourite ES song. shoulda ended on Kickin' Back On The Surface Of Your Cheek
I'm still yet to get into The Spark but I'm planning on going through all of their stuff again this year so I'll give it another chance at some point.
The entire first verse of Return to Energiser is like screaming with a mouth full of marbles. Glad they improved on technique
i love take to the skies but i think mostly because i got into it like a week before lockdown, so i associate that album so strongly with the aching of live community that feels like its outpouring at every corner of that album. for all of its technical faults it is still able to transport me into a space that makes me feel gloriously alive. feel like adieu woulda been a legendary closer if they went for it but alas
It'd be cool if this ended up charting well, I know they're not outwardly concerned with it as much this time but the surprise drop WITH PHYSICALS ON SHELVES ON THE SAME DAY is insane. I can't think of any other band that's done this?
Vocals on TTTS are incredible. How that album sounds is what makes it so damn good to me. This new album gets better and better with each listen. Shipwrecked is my early fav
That intro synth is my favorite call back to their other albums. Was always hoping they’d bring that back. Flick of a Switch is insanity. 3 listens in and can’t stop hitting the repeat button.
I actually just started the band's biography book and Rou actually talks about how he had throat problems while they were recording TTTS and whenever he re-listens to the album now, he thinks his voice sounds weak. It's probably my second last on my album rankings of theirs, and yet I put it on the other day and still had a tonne of fun.
New album is great. ALOT better than KISS. It's like they just wanted to write a cool album this time, whereas KISS they were trying to write songs that will get streams and the album ended up being a collection of unoriginal shikari sounding songs.
TTTS is still probably my favourite Shikari album but, yeah, I've never really liked the harsh vocals on it. But listen to the older versions of the songs (for example Mothership 2006 Download Version) and the vocals don't really sound that different. Maybe slightly better. Unless Rou had throat problems for years it was probably at least a combination of his throat getting better and improved technique.
They did a Rank Your Records feature before Nothing Is True came out and I remember Rou putting it up last and sharing his frustrations about it. I think he said he was ill during the recording and they didn't have a great experience with the producer as well. In more recent years, on the book they released that compiles tidbits about every single song, they also said they felt some songs didn't reach their full potential as they didn't have the songwriting and production skills to do that at the time, even calling "Jonny Sniper" amateurish iirc.
chris is not a fan of jonny sniper at all yeah that is where i will have to break away from what the band thinks though, i love that song lol
yeah Jonny is one of my favourites on that album funnily enough lol. the softer songs on there like History and Adieu are fantastic, it's the heavy ones that feel a bit amateurish to me
They'll never do it because they're not that band but if they ever decided to right those wrongs and make a Take to the Skies (Shikari's Version)... fuck
Yeah I'd be down for this, though I'd be sad if most of Chris' vocals got replaced by Rory's. They've been doing that live for a long time and I know Chris' voice deepened a lot, but it'd sound weird in studio form.
TTTS is my favorite but it’s because it came out during some of my formative moments in life, so it’s hard to top that mentally. However, I know their other albums have “better” material. TTTS is so classic though. Even the demos and b side songs we got in that era.
i honestly feel like i can understand any ranking of this band because they usually come into peoples lives at pretty formative points, establish a lot of key poles in how they perceive music, and then the band moves onto something completely different and go all in uncompromisingly for the next album. outside of me not being a fan of kiss i can kinda understand any of them being someones favorite that said, this is the best one
Yeah honestly I can see this end up in my top 3, joining Nothing Is True and The Mindsweep. I'm as blown away as I was with these albums at the time.
Performance directions I guess - with abandon/anguished/majestically. Outlines for each movement. Saving this for a first listen with my Shikari superfan bestie tomorrow but checked out Find Out the Hard Way as 'the single' and it ABSOLUTELY BANGS.