thread to dis hyped releases that you don't get/don't like/wanna complain about

I guess Julia sodding Holter. But I'm increasingly suspicious of big conceptual art-rock albums, and who'd blame me eh

(Or, if you want to join the cool kids in the cool room, Machine Girl)

I only use RYM to look for interesting metal records that haven't been written up much

it's not exactly hyped but the new Charalambides 2LP is extremely disappointing to me, aimless and way way way too sparse for my tastes, just the polar opposite of the glory that was Exile.

i liked it the two times i put it on but haven't felt like going back, i think you are on to something. i haven't even played the accompanying cassette.

the tape is even worse, sadly, was hoping for something like the stupendous vinyl-bonus tracks from Exile but everything on this release is like an unadorned guitar and a voice in a room together, not my favorite mode of theirs.

jenny wilson is one possible contender

more electronic tho

If you're not constantly maintaining a RYM account you're...uh...probably functional in other aspects of your life ;_;

― imago

i'm closing out 2018 as a reasonably functional human being in spite of the amount of time i spend on rym. i don't understand it either.

i adore tove styrke but sway was super underwhelming as an album unfortunately, not bad but she's clearly capable of much more

― ufo

Totally agree with this. Her first album was great and Kiddo was very close to being a masterpiece. Sway was such a letdown and probably my biggest disappointment of the year. Compared to what she did on Kiddo, it was way too samey and dropping the Lorde cover on the end made the whole thing seem so unfinished/rushed.

oh I definitely thought it was disappointing in terms of potential too, I just mean that it isn't notably better or worse than the Robyn album which is doing a similar thing but comes with a ready-made narrative

XP Disappointed to hear that the Charalambides record is underwhelming. Been a fan for like 20 years and I got to see them live for the first time in October. I enjoyed it as a moment in time, this sparse, alien music against the backdrop of the Ohio River, but it occurred to me that I probably didn't need to own a another record of this particular mode of theirs, so I haven't checked the new one out.

ah shit i think i love the traumprinz records

― princess of hell (BradNelson), Tuesday, November 13, 2018 5:21 PM (three weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this bore out: i do love them, dj healer slightly more than prime minister of doom

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Thursday, December 6, 2018 9:28 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sry not to add more off-track positivity but lol i think i also love the dj healer record now. thanks brad :-/

oh for dog latin, a 2018 equivalent of those big art rock albums is absolutely Anna Von Hausswolff's Dead Magic

1.
How could Tove Styrke make a better record than Kiddo? Most people never do.
Her shows this year were super killer though. Apparently the Boston show we were at was her first sold-out concert ever (capacity: 200)... she mentioned it a few times!

2.

I guess Julia sodding Holter. But I'm increasingly suspicious of big conceptual art-rock albums, and who'd blame me eh

(Or, if you want to join the cool kids in the cool room, Machine Girl)

― imago, Friday, December 7, 2018 1:52 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Conceptual art-rock album not to be suspicious of = Polycrisis: yes! by Jessica Sligter. She's been real great for a few years, but, this is a real special one.

Listening now. If anything it's even worse than Holter. I make no apology

I mean there's no 'rock' about this. You literally cannot call ambient bollocks with pretentious anti-capitalist warbling over the top of it 'art-rock'. I'd even dispute the 'art' bit. Everyone should check out the second track though! It's singularly annoying

(btw this thread is a safe space for overly harsh criticism so don't take it personally!)

you hype, I dis

Ach, as a fan, I tried with the von Hausswolff. It made me a) want to go look at some Goya ii) want to go find old Gira, knock his cowboy hat askance and ask him if he knows what he's done? and 3) wish for my old boring office job back, so I could sit at my desk, wish for anything but this and feel all scourged and transgressive.

you could just say that it was boring bollocks, which it was

imago dislikes record that doesn't exude hyper-kineticism, news at 11.

hey

I loved last year's Lingua Ignota record and that was slow as anything

I like records with character, that's all ;)

Both the Julia Holter and Anna von Hausswolff LPs have character. Just not the right kind, apparently. Anyway, I don't think either is the masterpiece some RYMers believe them to be but they certainly stand head and shoulders above the adolescent moaning of Black Dresses, for instance, which negates their otherwise solid instrumentals. You're right to assume obnoxiousness tends to imply character but I'm not beholden enough to the latter to gush over the former.

While we're at it, Daphne & Celeste belongs in the rolling worst 2018 music thread. I can only cringe for so long.

The Beths, what are you all thinking?

given that the Jessica Sligter album is something of a paean to the EU I'd probably not describe it as anticapitalist. it's also not a rock record but her previous ones were folk-rock more or less so is perhaps being described/considered in that context for that reason

going to studiously avoid pomenitul's excellent baiting and second boxedjoy. or at least...the beths are fine, but the way some of you go on about them it's like they're more than an extremely basic indie outfit with wholly unremarkable songs

Then there’s the presence across the album of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker – excerpts from two of his speeches feature, on ‘The Dream Has Died’ and ‘The State Of The Union’. On ‘The State Of The Union’, Sligter recites his words over an unsettling synth stab, veering into singsong cadence as she asks “Do we want to let our union unravel before our eyes?” while a sample of Juncker’s original address plays underneath.

lol, just wot i need to get through these suicidal dark winter nights!

literally the most heinous shit I've heard all year

the amount of basic indie that I hear about on ILM these days makes me think the exodus of more pop-oriented posters has had a deleterious effect on our discourse. The Meshell Ndegeocello album an example of the sort of thing I come to ILM to learn about (none of my other channels of learning of new music has mentioned it), but that and the Mr Fingers album have been about it this year on here for me. and this thread is listed a bunch of the acts I tried this year after seeing ILM hype. RIP

there's something about the autechre NTS sessions i find hugely disappointing. do the compositions warrant the interrogation? does the interrogation yield anything? do the reverb settings equal gravitas? why so many "menacing" signifiers? just seems conservatively limited to autechre-sound-world to me.
that's right, i want a peppy lo-fi goofy prog-pop autechre. and i ain't getting one. dang. more fool me.
i shall code a generative listening engine, and the machine solipsism will be complete.

i heard 4 minutes of that Jessica Sligter thing and have donated a year's wages to Arron Banks

'Art-rock' is a stupid term in the first place that can include any old bollocks so there's no sense getting irate about its misuse because it's literally impossible to do so.

the beths are fine, but the way some of you go on about them it's like they're more than an extremely basic indie outfit with wholly unremarkable songs

Haven't you repped heavily for Big Thief and Speedy Ortiz over the last few years?

it's a matter of songwriting sometimes? like especially speedy ortiz are pretty inventive with structure and melody, dull recent album excepted

massaman gai has nailed my own misgivings about the autechre nts sessions as well. elseq was miles better

the mediated worsening of the world has made everyone dour

As long as we move away from reductive poptimism (the worst kind of objective wrongness, by far), all is well with the world.

I'd much rather read trying-too-hard praise for a top 40 act than for the kind of 90s indie that'd have occasioned a trip to the toilets during a 90s festival

Why not neither?

when pop music is good it's politics at its best. unpop(ular) indie delivers more subjective pleasures which end up being more common

Politics, whether at its best or at its worst, is the last thing I want to hear in a musical work. It's always a part of it, of course, even when kept at bay, but aesthetics is more exciting to me.

I was talking about reading about music, i.e. about the hyping of music, the subject of this thread : how we write about music is political, and thus so is how we stand on pop music. anti-pop snobbery is a sure sign that I have no time for a person: eventually they will have me also up against the wall.

I don't hate pop music by any stretch of the imagination, but any discourse that enshrines it above all other genres (this is what I meant by 'reductive poptimism', which is indistinguishable from rockism) is, in fact, politically violent in that it silences less populist approaches to listening and music making. The amount of music out there is more overwhelming than ever – I don't think the solution is to systematically fall back on the same melodic contours, the same simplistic rhythms, the same comfortable timbres that are tautologically popular because they are popular. I always come back to that Kafka line about how a book should be the pickaxe that shatters the icy sea within us – I want music to do the same, whether it be pop or (more often) something else entirely.

We will spare philosophy PhDs (but not critical theorists) when it is time for the cull. xp

I agree with pomenitul. The idea you touched on before euler—that the “subjective” pleasures of indie are worse politically than the pleasures of the masses—seemed really sinister to me.

Systematically favouring works that are short and earwormy (loosely speaking) is an impoverished way of looking at music imho.

xps

Like, I love that experience, but I can't imagine wanting it more than everything else music has to offer.

pop's always been a way for me to square my alienation with the world as it is. to turn away from it is to turn away from the masses, and that not a politics I want any part of.

i can’t believe y’all have “misgivings” about the nts sessions, my god remove your heads from your asses

listen to something and engage with it on its own terms imo, which i guess isn’t what this thread is for