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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Every few years, I'll read, from start to finish, the Zwan Wikipedia article. Haven't done it in a few, so I just did. Something added was Matt Sweeney talking about how he was friends with Billy since before everything, and they apparently wrote and recorded a ton of stuff together. I know there were a couple interviews at the time where Billy was talking about how some people were being bullies and like stealing his blackberry and messaging people pretending to be him, and using hard drugs and that people within the band were sleeping together, and then Paz and I think Matt both were like "absolutely none of that is true."
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Dec 1, 2020 15:07
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CherryCola posted:I listened to the second half of Mellon Collie while cooking last week and I just...it's hard to put a finger on what Billy lost between then and now. But I think a big part of it is thinking that he's a good singer and that his singing should be front and center. Like the nasally, growly, screamy quality of his vocals were what made him so unique...this is just...I dunno, boring. There is a legitimate phenomenon casually called "ear fatigue", which happens when you listen to enough of something without any dynamics. Stuff on the radio has to be as static as possible, volume-wise, because you shouldn't be adjusting your dial too much, but otherwise, music SHOULD be produced with a full dynamic range. Except it's rarer and rarer for that to happen nowadays, and I'm noticing it in Pumpkins' stuff, too. But not only that, the actual feeling and songwriting feels same-y, too. I mentioned it before, but along with The Pixies, SP was one of the big proponents of the whole quiet loud quiet thing, and it's pretty much abandoned now, both technically and artistically. Sucks. Edit: vvvv Framboise knows what I'm taking about vvvv Rupert Buttermilk fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 15:10
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CherryCola posted:I listened to the second half of Mellon Collie while cooking last week and I just...it's hard to put a finger on what Billy lost between then and now. But I think a big part of it is thinking that he's a good singer and that his singing should be front and center. Like the nasally, growly, screamy quality of his vocals were what made him so unique...this is just...I dunno, boring. It's not just the vocals. There was so much more passion in the older stuff. Billy's angst and sadness resonated with a lot of people! Now his only real angst seems to be trolls on social media and it shows.* Emotion is just as much a paint on the canvas as lyrics are and Cyr as an album is so flat and not dynamic at all. Like, the second half of Mellon Collie goes from rock to metal to pop to straight up loving noise rock and that's just like the first few tracks-- that's not to say that Cyr needed to change genres every track, but each track on Cyr, aside from a couple, sound. The. loving. Same. And Billy sings them in ambiguous melodies that lack any sort of hook at all. The lyrics are as flowery as they have been in the past 20 years or so, but they lack any sort of visceral feel to them whatsoever. It's a hollow album, in my sad opinion. SAOSB Vol. 1 kicked this album's rear end in just 8 tracks. Like you can see a few posts back how optimistic I was trying to be for this album but I didn't expect to be let down this hard by it. My ~*~Pink Haze~*~ vinyl got backordered, so I tried to cancel the order and get my money back. I have yet to hear from their store on that. :| *Also not to say that you have to be angsty to make good music-- but let's not pretend Billy wasn't way loving better when he was.
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Dec 1, 2020 15:11
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Framboise posted:It's not just the vocals. There was so much more passion in the older stuff. Billy's angst and sadness resonated with a lot of people! Now his only real angst seems to be trolls on social media and it shows.* Take a song like Tonight, Tonight. It's loving visceral. It's a big romantic song that sounds like falling in love - it's bold, it's cinematic, it has a loving orchestra because that's what it needs. You listen to a song like "Colour Of Your Love" - and there's something there, but the execution is flat. Billy's gone from making movies to making sitcoms for Nick at Nite. This should be a song about lost love, but it's just sort of a competent synth-pop song. It doesn't connect with you. I think the biggest problem is that he doesn't seem to have anything to say anymore. There's nothing that drives it. Listen to a song like Cyr, and ask yourself - what does this mean? It's not nonsense. It's just... there's nothing there. It's impossible to connect with these lyrics. Take someone like Nick Cave - there's something there. It's a very clear feeling you get. Even when he sings his darker stuff, he grabs you because he puts you in a place. Meanwhile, Billy Corgan uses phrases like "maelstrom mouse" because it sounds poetic. He doesn't capture emotions, he doesn't capture places, he doesn't capture moments. He just writes something that sounds poetic, and so you can't really embrace it. Look at Tonight, Tonight again - "Time is never time at all, you can never ever leave without leaving a piece of you." It captures that feeling of being in love. It says something. "The void arrives, then leaves." That just sounds like a first draft written by a bad creative writing major. Finally, he needs a producer. I think he makes music with a really great potential, but he needs someone else there helping him out. Part of it is that these songs just sound bad. His stuff has had a really cheap sound. It honestly sounds like those K-Tel rerecordings you can find of bands from the 60s. Everything is too clean, and the mix levels are wrong. There's no grit. There's nothing to grab you. But let me put it this way - if you went to see a Smashing Pumpkins concert and they didn't play anything from after Machina II, just everything from the first part of their career, would you be disappointed? The fact is - Billy is making music with no risk. Maybe that's what he lost. Back in the 90s - he needed to be relevant. Now? Anything he does can be pushed out and forgotten, and it will serve his purpose because he'll always get press because of what he did in the 90s.
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Dec 2, 2020 01:51
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Cemetry Gator posted:Stuff These are all very good thoughts, which help back my question of why aren't you contributing to this? 
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Dec 2, 2020 03:15
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The album is so inoffensively boring. Also the lyrics sound like an AI that read a lot of super flowery poetry and tried to recreate it. This album is exactly what I thought it would be and it's hilarious. I'm waiting for Billy to start talking about how no one understands what he's trying to do, and that they don't want him doing anything new. It'll be awesome. Billy, do new things. Just, uh, try to do them well instead of this?
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Dec 2, 2020 06:19
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Cemetry Gator posted:Take a song like Tonight, Tonight. It's loving visceral. It's a big romantic song that sounds like falling in love - it's bold, it's cinematic, it has a loving orchestra because that's what it needs. You listen to a song like "Colour Of Your Love" - and there's something there, but the execution is flat. Billy's gone from making movies to making sitcoms for Nick at Nite. This should be a song about lost love, but it's just sort of a competent synth-pop song. It doesn't connect with you. And that's the thing-- everything Billy does now feels like a desperate need to cling to relevance, with the side effect of cheapening his own legacy with subpar work and cannot understand for the life of him why people don't like it as much-- it's just different, right? I'm just growing as an artist, right? He probably feels like everything he does is just as good and it's the fans who can't keep up with him. In reality, Cyr comes across as a Depeche Mode homage and just sounds... generic. Billy needs to understand that his voice is unique and sounds great when mixed right, but it does not belong anywhere near the front of the music. It'd be like going to an orchestra and there's like six extra oboes goin fuckin ham during a violin solo. And re: Pumpkins pre-2000s music: I actually did! It was the SAOSB show 2 years ago and it loving slapped. Sure they ended with Solara, but that was fine and Solara's a perfectly fine song (and kicks any track on Cyr's rear end despite not being THAT great). Like, compare any of his music from post-2000 to the absolute gutpunches that songs like Disarm, Mayonaise, or For Martha give. Or loving ANYTHING from Mellon Collie. And I think that's what I love and that's what's missing here-- they're extremely raw, heartfelt, personal songs that you can feel and relate to. I'll even go on record and say that Luna is one of my favorite Pumpkins tracks EVER-- not just because on the surface it's an incredibly tender song that is full of love and hurt at the same time, but also the story behind it: Billy Corgan, SD Reissue Liner Notes posted:Written in a hotel room in London on a three week stay. We come early for press, and the powers that be figure it’s cheaper to have us sit and wait than fly us home, only to return. I am in love with someone that doesn’t love me. My songs are better than hers. This is my way to prove a point not worth making. Just... gently caress, dude. That's the kind of feelings that make great music, the kind that speaks to people and they relate hard to it. It's not just visceral, it's Billy's heart ripped out and flung against the wall. I'm sure a lot of people can relate to having unrequited feelings like this. Meanwhile, I can't relate to anything on Cyr because the lyrics are cryptic and speak loving nothing to me. I love poetry and flowery turns of phrase but what the gently caress do any of these lyrics mean?
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Dec 2, 2020 06:44
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Yes. All of that. Very well stated. Give me any SP song up to and including MOST of Machina and it makes me feel things. Everything after that I feel just...nothing. (Though I will say I actually enjoyed Zwan)
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Dec 2, 2020 14:40
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CherryCola posted:I listened to the second half of Mellon Collie while cooking last week and I just...it's hard to put a finger on what Billy lost between then and now. But I think a big part of it is thinking that he's a good singer and that his singing should be front and center. Like the nasally, growly, screamy quality of his vocals were what made him so unique...this is just...I dunno, boring. The problem is that when the Pumpkins reformed and made Zeitgeist, Billy stopped singing and decided he would talk through every song in the future. His vocals kept improving through their initial run and peaked with Machina, where he truly had a good singing voice but still had the range of the growls and screams etc. but after reforming? He hasn't sung in any song, he really does just talk and that's why it sounds so flat and dull and emotionless. I remember when I first heard Zeitgeist and it started brilliantly with Doomsday Clock, it was like classic Pumpkins until Billy's voice came in and he just talked over this great song and completely ruined it. The band is rocking away and he's just talking through it rather than singing or expressing any emotion at all, it's weird as hell.
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Dec 2, 2020 18:58
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re: Lyrics ... What was the last album or song that had lyrics that were truly shovel to the back of the head memorable? Anything after Machina II is so very forgettable to me. "United States" is the only banger from the later era that I can vividly remember and all I got is that he says revolution a few times. Oceania was the last album I picked up, and while I remember the sound being pretty OK I could not tell you a drat thing about any of the words or what he says on that record.
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Dec 2, 2020 19:59
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 https://archive.org/details/tsp2000-12-02.brown.shn It's the twentieth anniversary of the Pumpkins' "final" show! 
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Dec 2, 2020 20:13
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God loving drat it RELEASE THE METRO SHOW BILLY
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Dec 2, 2020 20:39
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My Twitter Account posted:It's the twentieth anniversary of the Pumpkins' "final" show! My buddy (also a stupid die hard Pumpkin fan boi) and I so wanted to go to that, but the tickets were really hard to get (especially since we were in Houston, and not Chicago). We ended up dropping silly cash for tickets to the bigger Arena show that happened maybe the night before? That was a really good show, despite the basketball arena aesthetic. They did an opening acoustic set before turning up the volume. My memory is blurry, but I'm pretty sure he brought Corgan Sr. out to play that deep cut b-side off of maybe the "33" single that he plays on. "The Last Song" maybe? That show was broadcasted on the radio I think. e: SERIOUSLY! WHERE THE gently caress IS THE METRO VIDEO? The "gently caress You" live footage that's on the DVD is taken from that show right?
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Dec 2, 2020 20:42
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hatelull posted:re: Lyrics ... Machina I, for sure. Machina II is cool but didn't resonate with me much. I guess Let Me Give The World To You is on there but that was a remake of an Adore-era song.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:50
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Does anyone remember the astonishingly awful goth tribute album that came out that year? Oh my god it's loving on Spotify. I even know and like some of these bands now and...god why are these covers SO BAD??? https://open.spotify.com/album/7x9DKrEVhIHgTj3tJCMA0D?si=miS4BZpoSdub_P-QLVM5Ew
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Dec 2, 2020 21:19
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CherryCola posted:Does anyone remember the astonishingly awful goth tribute album that came out that year? Oh my god it's loving on Spotify. I even know and like some of these bands now and...god why are these covers SO BAD??? Was that a Cleopatra release? If it was cover album made up of industrial/goth artists then I'm guessing it was Cleopatra. It's what they did. They were rarely if ever good.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:25
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Yeah the Cleopatra tributes were generally awful with the occasional gem. Some artists seemingly made a career of it because you see the same bands on different albums over and over.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:37
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TOOT BOOT posted:Yeah the Cleopatra tributes were generally awful with the occasional gem. Some artists seemingly made a career of it because you see the same bands on different albums over and over. like Pig, Rosetta Stone and Razed in Black are groups that get some play down here these days and they're not bad...but I guess they must have gotten better?
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Dec 2, 2020 21:47
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I had that when it came out and I remember liking the cover of "Frail and Bedazzled" by Godbox, who appear to never have released an album.Framboise posted:Machina II is cool but didn't resonate with me much. This Is the Zodiac fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 21:51
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CherryCola posted:like Pig, Rosetta Stone and Razed in Black are groups that get some play down here these days and they're not bad...but I guess they must have gotten better? The Razed in Black Cherub Rock cover is the only one from that collection that I could ever stand.
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Dec 2, 2020 22:23
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hatelull posted:My buddy (also a stupid die hard Pumpkin fan boi) and I so wanted to go to that, but the tickets were really hard to get (especially since we were in Houston, and not Chicago). We ended up dropping silly cash for tickets to the bigger Arena show that happened maybe the night before? That was a really good show, despite the basketball arena aesthetic. They did an opening acoustic set before turning up the volume. My memory is blurry, but I'm pretty sure he brought Corgan Sr. out to play that deep cut b-side off of maybe the "33" single that he plays on. "The Last Song" maybe? Here's the setlist. It was 11/29 at the United Center so a few days before the Metro show. http://www.spfc.org/tours/date.html?tour_id=848 Looks like it was For Martha that WPCsr played on, which is an... interesting? choice.
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Dec 3, 2020 05:41
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Billy has sucked for longer than he was good at this point. I think maybe a lot of people were hoping the band getting back together would be the secret sauce that was needed but it doesn't appear that happened.
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Dec 3, 2020 06:31
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Dec 3, 2020 07:58
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Waiting for Billy to start responding to negative reviews with "haha just joking guys, honest, that was a joke, I can still write a bit, just wait for the next album! It'll be like a new era Siamese Dream!" He then does no such thing. Seriously though it's pretty sad how far the Pumpkins have fallen. They're still probably my favourite band but I have to remind myself to not invest myself in anything past M2.
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Dec 3, 2020 08:23
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The one vocalist Billy reminds me most of is Alanis Morisette, the way they both overemote and let their voice break. They can't just sing normal.
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Dec 3, 2020 09:25
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hatelull posted:re: Lyrics ... Framboise posted:Machina I, for sure. Machina II is cool but didn't resonate with me much. I guess Let Me Give The World To You is on there but that was a remake of an Adore-era song. Billy saying "We all know I'm full of poo poo" is a very memorable Pumpkins lyric from a banger of a song on Machina II  TOOT BOOT posted:Billy has sucked for longer than he was good at this point. I think maybe a lot of people were hoping the band getting back together would be the secret sauce that was needed but it doesn't appear that happened. Remember the first video from them getting back together where Billy was wearing a cape while shooting lasers out of his eyes and it was hilarious but then for a brief moment the song went quiet and sounded right like a slice of Siamese Dream and people got all excited over it thinking he still had it and... yeah. The only thing I've liked since the band got back together is this and imagining what a studio version in the style of Zero could be like with that guitar solo and his screams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aajvG_qUJQg Hoping a good recording of this somehow turns up on the Machina reissue. It sounds like something from that era that was simply unreleased.
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Dec 3, 2020 13:31
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LITERALLY EXACTLY THIS
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Dec 3, 2020 14:06
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Nearly forgot this, another great song from the same early reunion era that never made it onto an album. Always wondered why Sasha Grey was in the video but I think Billy went through a phase? Remember something about him dating Tila Tequila  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9klvSGc2ik
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Dec 3, 2020 14:46
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I always kind of wished that the Pumpkins got the Rock Band treatment, not even to the extent of the Beatles, but even like Guitar Hero's Aerosmith release. Just all their stuff, their likenesses... Would've been neat. But of all the ships that have sailed, that's the sailiest ship of them all. Didn't G.L.O.W. get a mock Corgan character in-game? Edit: oh, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOB3QVqLYBk Rupert Buttermilk fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 14:59
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SUNKOS posted:Nearly forgot this, another great song from the same early reunion era that never made it onto an album.
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Dec 3, 2020 15:33
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syntaxfunction posted:Waiting for Billy to start responding to negative reviews with "haha just joking guys, honest, that was a joke, I can still write a bit, just wait for the next album! It'll be like a new era Siamese Dream!" Billy would never say that. I know he said something about Monuments being like Siamese Dream but I think he was talking about being in the same headspace or using similar structures or something. He's always going to fall back on "I'm going to make the music I make, don't expect me to just revisit the same old materials or try to recreate the past." He's even at the point where if you try to compare anything he writes to something from his past he immediately dismisses it as an offensive thing to say. I mean like it or not, I think the idea of a bunch of rock musicians in their 50s saying "we're going to make the music we feel like making, if you don't like it gently caress off" is actually kind of admirable? The new album's not particularly good but I appreciate that he's willing to just say "gently caress it, we're doing a New Order album."
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Dec 3, 2020 15:45
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That I will agree on; he has the opportunity to just do whatever, and that's exactly what he's doing. So, good on him for that.
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Dec 3, 2020 16:02
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Baron von Eevl posted:The new album's not particularly good but I appreciate that he's willing to just say "gently caress it, we're doing a New Order album." Indeed. I absolutely agree with the sentiment and rarely if ever do I want an artist to simply cut and paste the ONE album or sound that locked them into a gold standard with me. The Pumpkins have always been pretty obvious about updating and progressing their sound. A simple stroll through the earlier LP's to the later material will tell you that. My main issue is that in 2020 he's making a super boring New Order album.
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Dec 3, 2020 16:53
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I remember watching an old "Behind the Music" (VH1?) episode about the making of Adore and how it was such a departure for the band after MCIS but it was interesting to see how the band members were quite candid about everything from what happened with Jimmy and how Billy just wanted to evolve (I guess kinda like Radiohead's 'Kid A' moment, but years earlier and with less impact) and I remember how it started with D'Arcy and James clearly not knowing what Billy was trying to do but near the end as the sound came together I remember D'Arcy coming round and getting what Billy was trying to achieve and being fully behind it and articulating quite well what the actual goal was. I think James just kept talking about carrot juice? I forget the exact wording now but I remember it being that after the death of grunge Billy wanted to create something that didn't sound like it belonged to any movement/era/time (the word for this escapes me right now) and I think he mostly succeeded with that. The album is 22 years old and really wouldn't seem that out of place being released today, in my opinion, because some songs just have not dated at all (Daphne Descends is a particular favorite and good example of this).
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Dec 3, 2020 16:59
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I think Wyytch or however it's spelled bothers me for two reasons, 1 he keeps saying "sam hane" and that's like an elementary level mispronounciation* of Samhain and 2 it's the only guitar and drums driven hard rock song on the album. It sounds loving weird! It's weird that it's a 73 minute album, it's weird that it's 20 loving songs and they average out to be about 3 and a half minutes. I think I would have liked it better if there was more variety and texture. Maybe 9 New Order-y songs, 3 guitar hard rock songs and 3 acoustic songs. gently caress, use some of the same synths from the first batch on the other tracks to give it some consistency, I don't care. Maybe one of the electronic-y songs is more ambient and takes it's time. 20 songs is a lot and it's hard to keep the momentum going even if they're all somewhat short songs. *Billy is a loving legend of insane mispronunciations. The man is incapable of fact checking literally anything before committing it to tape SUNKOS posted:I remember watching an old "Behind the Music" (VH1?) episode about the making of Adore and how it was such a departure for the band after MCIS but it was interesting to see how the band members were quite candid about everything from what happened with Jimmy and how Billy just wanted to evolve (I guess kinda like Radiohead's 'Kid A' moment, but years earlier and with less impact) and I remember how it started with D'Arcy and James clearly not knowing what Billy was trying to do but near the end as the sound came together I remember D'Arcy coming round and getting what Billy was trying to achieve and being fully behind it and articulating quite well what the actual goal was. I think James just kept talking about carrot juice? Yeah Adore is kind of a sleeper masterpiece.
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Dec 3, 2020 17:02
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Baron von Eevl posted:Billy is a loving legend of insane mispronunciations. The man is incapable of fact checking literally anything before committing it to tape
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Dec 3, 2020 17:13
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God, I just remembered the story behind Starla was that he met a girl at a party named Starla and then years later ran into her again and said something like "hey did you hear, my famous band had a song named after you" and she was like "my name is Darla."
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Dec 3, 2020 17:22
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I wonder what Sandoz's real name was. Maybe Carlos?
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Dec 3, 2020 17:34
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Baron von Eevl posted:I think Wyytch or however it's spelled bothers me for two reasons, 1 he keeps saying "sam hane" and that's like an elementary level mispronounciation* of Samhain and 2 it's the only guitar and drums driven hard rock song on the album. It sounds loving weird! It's weird that it's a 73 minute album, it's weird that it's 20 loving songs and they average out to be about 3 and a half minutes. I think I would have liked it better if there was more variety and texture. Maybe 9 New Order-y songs, 3 guitar hard rock songs and 3 acoustic songs. gently caress, use some of the same synths from the first batch on the other tracks to give it some consistency, I don't care. Maybe one of the electronic-y songs is more ambient and takes it's time. 20 songs is a lot and it's hard to keep the momentum going even if they're all somewhat short songs. One of my favorite live iterations of the band was from that tour.
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Dec 3, 2020 17:47
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SUNKOS posted:I wonder what Sandoz's real name was. Set the Jay to Garry. Baron von Eevl posted:God, I just remembered the story behind Starla was that he met a girl at a party named Starla and then years later ran into her again and said something like "hey did you hear, my famous band had a song named after you" and she was like "my name is Darla." This was in the Pisces Iscariot liner notes, actually. He fully admits it. Don't mind me, can't remember poo poo. Rupert Buttermilk fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 17:54
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