I mean, it's factually not douchy and not writing off an opinion. It's a real thing. Confirmation bias means that your comment saying "everyone I interact with thinks it's their best album by far" is not a valid argument for it being their best album. You are using personal experience to come to a conclusion. I never said anything about you liking it or not, that is irrelevant to this conversation. Love it all you want, I truly don't care. It is an actual fact that a large majority of people who listen to, or have listened to Finch prefer WIITB. It's well documented over many years of articles, online discourse, and actual album sales and streams. Again, this is not a conversation about opinion, I am explaining that your friends liking SHTS more is called "confirmation bias," which is what my post said.
I should also say re: liking SHTS — I was still ride or die for Drive-Thru at that time haha. I fucked with anything remotely DTR related for what felt like much longer than most people I knew did. Still liked the record for the reasons above, but that bias was 100% there
what I'm getting from this whole diatribe is "when you say people prefer SHTS it's confirmation bias but when I say people prefer WIITB it's an inarguable objective fact", which does in fact strike me as very douchey and dismissive despite your assumption I wasn't just saying I have a circle of friends who prefer this one album. when SHTS dropped I was really immersed in the Glassjaw/Deftones/post-hardcore scene, and there was an entire wave of people who'd written Finch off as generic Warped Tour pop-punk suddenly get interested. I knew Faith No More and Dillinger Escape Plan fans who started praising this one album. I still engage with some of those people more than a decade later and the recurring pattern is that SHTS is the only Finch album they could give a damn about - maybe PHANTASMA because they see that as a comeback after Back to Oblivion tried to appeal to the pop-punk crowd and was a massive disappointment I don't say all this to claim that any album was somehow objectively better than the other, I'd never be that magnanimous. I only bring this up to refute the claim that SHTS was somehow an album that nobody wanted. it very clearly was playing to a different, niche crowd and so, obviously, didn't see the kind of sales or radio play what WTIIB did. fortunately numbers and money are not the only metrics by which to measure the level of interest in an album I'm sure you can write all that off as personal experience (which somehow, doesn't accurately reflect the level of acclaim for an album to you, as if music isn't an intensely personal thing lol) and throw some facts around so, y'know, whatever. I'm gonna bow out here because this kind of discourse bums me out and gives me headaches and I don't think it's really worth the time. but yeah fairly certain I'm not just some loner raving in the dark about the love for this album. peace
SHTS definitely isn't as hooky most of the time but there's still some I can absolutely get stuck in my head. Both Insomniatic Meat and Bitemarks & Bloodstains. "Tie me to a chaaaaaaair, subconsciouslyyyy, surrenderingggg"
I’ll jump in and say I don’t like SHTS and definitely prefer WIITB, which I think is a classic album from that era.
I actually listened to both last night, I would definitely agree with you on the compilation version being better than the album version
I used to really like They’re Only Chasing Safety, then Underoath released Define The Great Line. Once DTGL was released, I couldn’t listen to TOCS anymore. I’m the same way with WIITB and SHTS.
I appreciate what the band did because they wanted to, but the majority of their albums I find to feel monotonous by the end. I honestly never really liked DTGL, I've listened SO many times trying to change that, but the album feels like one long song until the last 3 songs. I at least like DTGL better than LITSS though. I used to think I didn't like Disambiguation, but I think I actually like it now. The new one was cool, but I get why people don't like it. I think overall I just miss the bands hooks, which are HUGE on TOCS. TOCS does an amazing job of mixing the heavy side with the catchy hooks, similar to like.. The Used s/t. When Underoath went heavier, they lost a lot of their hooks which I thought they did so well at. TOCS > Erase > Disambiguation > DTGL > LITSS > TCOT > the first two deal with it
I like Erase Me quite a bit but TOCS over Disambiguation/DTGL/LITSOS is straight up blasphemy to me lol.
Just since the thread’s been active and discussing SHTS, if anyone’s looking for a trip back in time: https://archive.vn/20140827194142/http://www.absolutepunk.net/showthread.php?t=97371
Is that the wayback? I’ve heard people talk about it but have never used it haha. I was on the STHS wiki looking something up and saw that the review was linked so I went to it and bam, instant nostalgia
ah, it's archive or whatever. i think they are the same website, wayback machine and archive. Its essentially archived parts of the internet