I have every song from Symphony on my hard drive except Star Wars and Swimming, which never leaked to my knowledge
Can you share the actual tracklist from that unreleased EP? I assume I have most of the songs but I'd love to know
OK, I found the tracklist, I am missing the Elliott Smith song. Can anyone share? Would really appreciate it. Remember hearing about that one alot back in the day too.
Well, Dopamine definitely grew on me over the years. Just revisited it and I thoroughly enjoyed 9/12 tracks.
For a band that often gets tagged as being “first two albums then bust,” they have a remarkably high hit rate for me across the first five LPs. First three are masterpieces, Ursa Major is excellent, and Dopamine is very good. They lose it a bit after that, though I do really like about half of Screamer.
I have a lot of fondness for that album. Came out at the end of the summer before I went off to college, and I remember playing it so, so many times in the dying days of that season, before I left town. A bittersweet, beautiful album for me, for that reason.
My mom went to the store on release day to buy me the album and dropped it off to school as my “lunch” so I could listen to it on my bus ride to my track meet that same day haha.
Ursa, Screamer, and Band Aparte are the only duds IMO and those each still have 2-3 pretty cool 3EB songs.
agreed. I like it better than Blue at this point. But Blue is great too I wish SJ would go back to that type of songwriting, he had such a unique way of writing catchy vocal melodies on the first 3 albums in particular. The newer stuff is fine. Just feels lazier somehow.
I agree with this pretty much. all have some winners but there's a tendency to sabotage the best moments for reasons I can't possibly fathom. what's that one UM that's really good up until Stephan decides to try full-on rapping lmao
In the camp of Ursa Major absolutely not being a dud, has a lot of great songs, will not be hearing counter-arguments at this time.
If you don't think songs like Bonfire, Sharp Knife, Summer Town, Water Landing, Dao of St Paul and Monotov's Private Opera are this band at their absolute best, I don't know what to say
For me, Ursa feels like they had the beginnings of a good album but ran out of the creative energy (or the band members) to make the album that was forming, and instead we get those initial decent songs padded out with some really uninspired 3EB/Stephen songs. The better songs on Ursa share a lot of DNA with Out of the Vein but, to me, OotV has those solid songs plus even better songs and more varied songs around them.
I'm pretty sure he mentioned they had an album already done but he was behind on coming up with lyrics on that Spotify 24 Questions Party people podcast from maybe 1-2 years ago.