Remember when Taylor basically released a whole second album like 45 mins after she released Tortured Poets? This is nothing. Haha
So many songs. Great summer tunes, per usual. Seeing him two months from today. Hoping for no rain, but I mean, rain would be appropriate.
feel about this very similarly to how I feel about Zach Bryan and Drake albums. some undeniably great songwriting that's being washed out by the choose-your-own-adventure of the bloated tracklist. Favorites on first listen: "Spoiled", "Headed North", "Staying Still", "Paid Time Off", "All Them Horses", "American Cars", "End of August", "Dashboard". Add them to the singles and I've basically got a regular length album!
Records like this should come with commercial breaks lol. Joking aside, I need to spend more time with it.
Gave it another play. It was already too long. Now it’s definitely too long. An editor is a good thing.
Zach COULD be. Self titled is pretty dynamic, but yes the correct length haha. Self titled plus Boys Of Faith would arguably be 21 tracks that works... But it's clearly better it's an album and EP separate, he's should have kept that up
Even self-titled I find pretty melodically one-note, though. I think he writes so many songs that he tends fall into habits with chords and phrasing. I think the key with Zach would be to write less and work on songs for longer. Lots of rough drafty stuff on his new album, IMO.
Fair enough, it's probably just because it's shorter and more concise, but I do find that album to be the most musically diverse
Drove through the snowy Montana mountains this evening blasting this. was probably one of the perfect first listens of an album i have had (photo from said drive)
Just finished my first listen of the album. It’s not as strong as Stick Season imo, but stick season also grew on me so I’ll listen to this more over the summer and see how it changes. Right now the songs I liked the most were The End of August (top 5 Noah song imo) Paid Time Off 23 We Go Way Back A Few of Your Own Orbiter Dan
"Dan" and "Headed North" erasure! I like that "Deny Deny Deny" is upbeat, but that ain't enough for me to include it haha.
I like "Dan," but it's symptomatic of the "stacking multiple potential closers at the end of the record" thing I mentioned earlier in this thread, and I prefer "Horses" as the capper. "Headed North" is my least favorite song on the proper album.
It's only been a few days, I have no idea how you can make a cut down version without letting any of the songs sink in or grow
i showed my wife the two cut down versions and she said, "their initial tastes are horrible!" hahaha. she's especially mad that neither of you guys at least had "orbiter."
I've only listened to this all the way through* twice now, and "Orbiter" felt like my least favorite song out of the entire thing, but I honestly can't tell if that is more due to the very long tracklist and me just being a little weary of his style by that point. I want to listen to the back half of this on its own a bit more, because the first chunk definitely feels like an album to me and then it starts to feel less intentional and more just like a pile of songs that keeps going. In fairness though, * even the two "full" listens I had were broken up and were not uninterrupted, and that could absolutely have played into how it struck me.
It’s this or nothing. I’m okay letting half the album grow on me because I don’t personally like his music enough to keep doing 100+ minutes of it. Would rather listen to the new Morgan Nagler album three times. PSA everyone check this record out!
I see both sides of this - back in the day, with how albums used to be, I would have absolutely agreed with this take, but now in the days of streaming and padding numbers and "deluxe" versions that come out the very same day and all the rest, this just seems like a perfectly normal response, especially if you're more of a casual fan of the artist
20-track albums very rarely feel like intentional album listening experiences to me. They feel like data dumps intended to goose streaming numbers. So, when those albums come across my desk, I’m just not that precious about saying”I don’t like this song,” or “This song is boring,” or “This album has too many samey midtempo songs in a row,” and then curating something I like more. I think I enjoy Noah Kahan more than @Matt Chylak, and I wouldn’t say “it’s this or nothing” for me, because I do intend to go back to the other songs as well. But I think I’ve been vocal about my frustration with the extremely long albums trend, and my way into a lot of those albums in the past few years has been giving myself the challenge of “OK, I don’t really love this as presented, but how can I make something that I think works as an album?” See: Cowboy Carter, the latest Zach Bryan album, Midnights, the Post Malone country album, the last Gracie Abrams album, Syndicate by The Midnight, etc. These are all albums that had a lot of raw materials I loved, but that I struggled with in their released form. And in all of those cases, I was able to find my way toward appreciating the albums a lot more by making alternate track lists. You know who also didn’t include “Orbiter”? Noah Kahan! I liked that one. A cool vibe. It would have filled the “late-album ballad” role in my tracklist if this album didn’t already have a lot of those. Me making a condensed version isn’t just leaving the other songs for dead on the side of the road. I’ll still listen to the full thing, probably a lot of times. But when an album comes out that I think has a lot of good components but doesn’t work very well as a listening experience, I like to break it apart and see how I can make it more enjoyable for myself personally.
Idk, I don’t see it as disrespecting the artists. I see it as disrespecting the trend that they have been forced to play to by the modern streaming economy, but not the albums and not the songs. Wipe Spotify out of existence and I think this guy would make better, more concise albums. This cutdown is just my fantasy casting of what that album would look like.