Quote:
Originally Posted by Anteater
I beg to differ. How can you not like Tracey Thorn on 'The Tree Knows Everything' or the cruisy title track? This isn't some generic techno: it explores a variety of styles outside its core genre and explores some fairly compelling melodic territory in the process.
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Whether this is true or not would depend on who's listening.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anteater
I don't know why you're such a stickler about something like this yet can praise comparatively abstract hip-hop or generic K-pop.
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Apples and Oranges?
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Anyway, I've checked out the album myself and here's what I think about it:
The album does go to a variety of places, but there's a very particular 90's electronic music style that forms the base for most of it. I'm not sure what to call it (EDIT: drum and bass, I guess) and it's not anything I'd ever listen to on my own, but let's say that it's this kind of electronic music that sounds like many a mid 90's Playstation 1 soundtrack. I can't tell you how many run off the mill action games I've played with these sorts of beats and bass lines.
Colours doesn't add up to a bad album for me, but I'm no a fan of the very wallpaper-y quality of it. I'm finding it very difficult to stay interested in these tracks, so all of them feel like they run a minute or two over time and I'm getting fidgety.
There's a fair degree of sonic variety, some good ideas spread across most of the album, but I'm just not engaged by this at all. I'm a very active music listener and this album is begging to stay in the background. It's the same reason why I never like any ambient albums.
It's probably very well made for what it is, but I have to give a score according to my personal experience with the album: voted "meh".
EDIT: Totally admit to writing this before I was all the way through the album. But I do insist on listening to every last second of an album club entry, so I had a few more thoughts after the final track had rolled on by. "Aromatherapy" - the 7 minute track the album ends on - is the best track on the album. I really like some of the sounds used here, especially the shimmering keyboard hook that opens and closes the track. Still, I can't really say that I'm going to be itching to come back to any of this, but if all of the album had been of the caliber of that final track, I'd have bumped the score up one notch.
On another note, I think it would be great if I could give every album club 2-4 complete run throughs (like I did in the beginning), but it's not realistic. At least I always make sure to hear the whole thing, even if I hate it, just in case it breaks with my expectations. It's only fair to give people's albums a proper chance. I don't actually know what everyone else's approach is, but to me, at least 1.0 proper listens is a minimum. This particular album was over one hour long... and it felt like it too... Some albums are easier to be fair about than others
(I would like to apologize to everyone for that Madredeus album, btw).