• 2 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle



  • Man, these guys have changed their sound. I didn’t realize they put out a new album. I’ll have to give it a new listen. Honestly A Laughing Death In Meatspace was the last I really got into, but after listening to The Drones and getting such a similar taste, I think a change in direction might be good for them. I like their sensibilities, but maybe got a little tired with their specific sound—which was pretty unique, but doing a unique thing is only unique for so long. Thanks for the post, I’m putting their new stuff in my roto



  • Not to mention, I spend way less time mindlessly browsing lemmy—Reddit was like a compulsion. To the point that, when I knew I was leaving July, I was actually getting worried about my ability to do so. I never want to feel that way about another app. I get on lemmy, I browse around for a bit, but I don’t feel the utter need to keep scrolling. Some stuff interests me, some doesn’t…but the stuff that doesn’t is usually relevant to someone in my life. So I send it to them, and sometimes these are people I don’t typically talk to regularly.

    All in all, lemmy has been a net positive in my life. I still get the app I can scroll when I’m looking to kill time, I can still write about stuff I care about, I can interact with other people…it’s the perfect balance for me. I don’t need that “everything all the time” shit. In fact, I’ve been trying to pull away from that entirely baseless desire in my life, which is nothing but a capitalist mindset. We don’t need everything. I don’t want to think I want everything.




  • It’s a nuanced issue. Because before VAR, the quality of the first impression calls were altering entire seasons. Entire tournaments. Now, the rules are followed to a T. Which absolutely alters the game in a different way, but now it’s not about one asshole’s probably obstructed or misjudged view in the moment. We all get to see exactly what needs to be called, and it gets called. So that means you’re getting PKs for what was ultimately a dive, but there actually was a grazing contact. We need to change the rules to adapt.

    We need to give the officials more discretion over carding for diving. So ultimately: that graze didn’t impede your movement and you felt the light touch and dove. Yellow card.

    We need to say that contact isn’t the determining factor, but obstructive contact. If that glancing touch clipped your trailing foot and you ultimately lost balance because of it, yes that’s a foul. Because with slow motion and human reaction time, it’s so clear when that touch was embellished and you decided to go down. But the officials are basically looking past the dive to see if even the slightest contact was made. The rules need to be updated. Kill two birds: eliminate problematic diving and make the game more honest.

    We’d need way more VAR officials per game and the first official would lose some power, but it’d make way more sense seeing as how it wouldn’t just be one opinion changing things but a small team of professionals making the best call.

    But this is just one man’s opinion. Yes it can be problematic and it’s changed things, but utilized properly it can change things for the better.


  • Oh man. Their first two are fuckin stellar. I think the third one is just watered down. They went indie pop, shifting away from their more indie roots.

    It’s hard to describe. They got more melodic? That doesn’t make much sense, but her voice changed from kind of a little more atonal/flat (but also full of emotion) to a more sing-songy thing. And the guitar tones were smoothed out. They just got shinier. It doesn’t work for me. Their first two albums speak to me, the emotion is raw and her singing really complements the poetry. The third album feels like…I dunno. She’s singing but doesn’t have as much to say? It’s weird and it’s all personal preference. Someone below was saying they think Hop Along’s third studio album is their best. Where I think their first is their only actually good one. I bet personally attached to whole albums.

    Now, there is a kind of thing that happens with art, where you get personally attached to previously existing works and are wary of anything that comes out later. And maybe that’s factoring in some (although CC I paid attention to the last two out of three)—but id also argue that some of my favorite bands kept making newer stuff that continued to stay good and fresh. I can actually think of quite a few. So I take his entire paragraph back, I’m definitely right about the third one sucking lol




  • Wow. So have you been diagnosed with terrible taste or are you living in denial?

    Just kidding. But go back and listen to their first major release, Get Disowned. A near perfect indie album, with enough punk sensibilities and amazing lyricism to set it apart from the pack. Not to mention it’s unique cadence, where you can tell Frances wrote the songs with her guitar, and then had the band fill in. So it’s not as produced, because the structure was there. Using the band to fill in those spaces gives the amazing lyrics a true punch of sound, because he music follows the words around the tune. It’s very unique in that right.

    Compare the lyrics of Get Idsowned to Bark Your Head off, dog. It’s so clear GD was thought out, not rushed, and it was cared for and labored over…And then everything they’ve done since signing to a bigger label was so obviously written with the whole band, probably IN the studio, under the nose of a producer. It’s so…pop. Which, if you listen to Frances’ early solo stuff and the first ever “Hop Along” album, Is Something Wrong?, you’d see that’s not what she does best.

    The Hop Along, Queen Ansleis album is really rough and pretty juvenile, but you can still get a sense of what set her apart in songwriting. She had a unique sound that’s been either bought out of her or that she just lost as she ran out of stories to tell.

    We can have different opinions on this, but I’m very much of the opinion that even Painted Shut sucks. They lost their sound. I’ll always wonder what would’ve happened if they never signed to saddle creek and stayed on an even smaller label. I saw them a few times, they were opening for Apples In Stereo and they played Johnny Brenda’s. These are all before Painted Shut came out. But I heard the singles from that album and got that sinking feeling. It just…changed so much. And I really can’t say enough about how much the lyrical talent was sucked out of her. Because look at the poetry of GD. And then at a song like…Powerful Man. Which is one of he worst songs I’ve ever heard, not even just from bands I like otherwise. Like…the song sucks. The lyrics are trash. And they haven’t gotten better since.