I've finally had a chance to give this a few uninterrupted listens now on my commute. There are still a handful of tracks that I just don't like nearly as much as most people seem to ("Hold You Now", "Rich Man", "My Mistake", "2021") but I love the fact that they just went for it and put so many tracks on the album. I wouldn't say any of those 4 songs are bad at all, just not up to par with the other 14 for me. The closest I come to actually not liking a song would have to be "2021", and that is only because I find the repeated "boy" to be extremely annoying - otherwise it is a really interesting and cool song. I really assumed that I would be doing what Ezra said some people will be doing and chopping about ⅓ of the tracks off of here, but I really don't think I'll be doing that. I did not like "Big Blue" or "Sunflower" at first and I have come around on both of those tracks in a major way. I did not like the Danielle Haim collabs at first and now I love 2 out of 3. I could definitely see myself playing this thing and just loving the whole damn hour real soon.
Sympathy was a little weird at first for me, but it absolutely won me over by the end. My man was beating the shit out of the drums
I’m coming around to this a little. I think it’s missing some of the energy that their previous albums had, but a lot of this is still really beautiful. The “all I do is lose, but baby, all I want’s to win” line in the closer is classic VW and makes me smile so damn much.
This is just so good all the way through. I don’t know where to rank it, but that’s because all four albums are damn near flawless in my opinion. What an absurdly good run of albums they’re having. Not many bands can compare.