Aye, 2021 was a good year for em imo!
And weāre into 2021 with EARTH MAN BLUES
First ever listen of this for me. Seems fun, very loose and easy
This is going to be interesting - I remember really enjoying EMB at the time, and yet for some reason I didnāt care for it much when I revisited it a few months ago.
This might be a rare example of me going cold on a GBV album over time (usually the opposite is the case), but Iāll give it a few spins this week to find out!
Ah wicked! Would like to be hearing it again for the first time!
I think that shows how strong a lot of the tracks are even if the record doesnāt hang together massively well. I voted for the ballads. But I totally dig the big rockers on it too.
and then the cynical view is that itās consistently decent without any real standouts
think nowadays I really want a few gems to get stuck in my head more than an all-round solid album which doesnāt quite take off (imho) so feel like a bunch of this era of albums might suffer from the same shoulder-shrug from me. But ofc very happy to be proved wrong
also quite funny that GBV are probs my fav band ever, yet I find myself voting under the average score on quite a few albums! maybe im just a harsh prick
Starting to get caught up
Mirrored Aztec isnāt as weak as I remembered, at the time I had high expectations coming off Poppy Field, an album I really liked, so it felt very frustrating and disappointing that they lost that newfound momentum again immediately.
Listening back now, itās not bad to be fair, some decent tunes, nice sound/production. Itās just quite by-the-numbers really and even the standout tracks arenāt really huge classics that stick in the memory. If they released this in say 2017 I might have thought a bit more fondly of it but it comes at a time when the weariness has very much set in so itās harder to be charitable. Feel like that might be a recurring theme going forward from here.
congrats, your vote just relegated Please Be Honest back to last place!
Weirdly Please Be Honest probably is worse than Mirrored Aztec in most senses and yet Iād be far more inclined to stick it on
Same here I think. Although theyāre very different vibes.
I guess theyāre just more interesting when theyāre ābadā than when theyāre just very average
Tobinās Starfire just popped on autoplay there, instantly checked to see what it was as it sounded like just my thing lovely tune
The piano version from his recent rarities disc?
nah just the standard version, but didnāt instantly recognise it until his voice came in (Youtube played it after listening to a Michael Head track, fit well)
Ah, nice. Such a tune
Enjoyed my first revisit to EMB this morning, plenty to like IMO. Dunno why I had such a weird downer on it last year, mustāve been in a bad mood that day!
One or two songs are let down by Bobās odd vocal choices though e.g. How Can A Plumb Be Perfected? and especially The Disconnected Citizen.