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Author Topic: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List  (Read 6853 times)

Junior

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #20 on: July 18, 2013, 11:44:35 PM »
I'd go with something not at all prog-y because I hate you and want to see you suffer. Or, you seem to be listening a good deal to that new Vampire Weekend and this album is kinda like that, a bit. Well, I actually want to recommend two albums, but in a way where you can pick one based on your mood. For the more melancholy times, try If You're Feeling Sinister. If you're in a poppier mood go for Dear Catastrophe Waitress. The two sides of Belle & Sebastian. I've made each album title a youtube link (because Spotify is stupid and I hate it) for the two "If" songs from those albums.
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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #21 on: July 19, 2013, 09:22:48 AM »
I have to make choices? Oh man. I think I might listen to the opening track from each album to decide.

Bondo

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #22 on: July 20, 2013, 12:01:56 AM »
Door #1: Jars of Clay/ Jars of Clay


I like a this album. Though it is close with their second one Eleventh Hour? First band I saw live.

oldkid

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #23 on: July 20, 2013, 12:43:22 PM »
I consider their first album a high water mark, and they have produced good albums since, but none as good as the first.

I would rank their albums pretty close to their release:

1. Jars of Clay  (First)
2. If I Left the Zoo (Third)
3. Much Afraid  (Second)
4. The Eleventh Hour (Fourth)
5. Redemption Songs (Fifth original)
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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #24 on: July 20, 2013, 01:10:23 PM »
Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) [From Important Albums]

When people talk about Pink Floyd, they sound like a group I should love. They’ve got those conceptual songs, an interesting sound and, of course, they’re a progressive rock band. However, going through their albums a first time, none of them hooked me. I’m willing to give them a second shot, so I’m going to work through some of their biggest albums again, starting with The Dark Side of the Moon.

I like this album the most when it’s pure music. The slow pacing, the rhythmic building of a lot of these songs is soothing and mysterious. The slow, rhythmic building in Time and the majority of On the Run and the opening of Us and Them are all wonderful music moments.

However, once we get to the lyrics of a lot of these songs I find myself a bit annoyed. Breathe, for instance has a line “And all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be” that I just find extremely trite amid sounds that’s mysterious and ethereal as these. It’s a weird declaration of Empiricism in an album that seems to be immersed in ambiguous sounds.

Then, in Time, you’ve got this bit:

Home, Home again
I like to be here, When I can
When I come home, Cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones, Beside the fire


Within the music, once again, I find the lyrics at tension with the sounds. The music sounds out of this world and yet the song is talking about this feeling for home and the familiar. I don’t buy it. I find it annoyingly out of place. This bit also gets to another problem with the lyrics: they’re too meandering. You can see in those lines a sort of tempo, like a poem, but in the song each line seems to languish until it fades.

However, I do really like some of these tracks. Money is great and easily my favorite track from the album. The sound sampling, the rhythm, the lyrics, all of it come together in a way that produces something I just don’t feel with a lot of the other songs in the album. Brain Damage/Eclipse is another song where I think the sound, tone, pacing and lyrics come together for me, but not quite as much as Money.

The Dark Side of the Moon is a good album. I like its sound, but the lyrics get in the way and it just doesn’t grab me as much as other prog albums. It’s a bit too intangible and elusive for me. It’s good, I get why people like it, but it doesn’t do much for me.


oldkid

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #25 on: July 20, 2013, 01:26:17 PM »
Being a Pink Floyd fan, I will not try to defend the album to you.  If you didn't care for it, that's fine.  :'(

But I will say that the tension between the spacey music and the solid, sometimes harsh lyrics really works for me.  In fact, I didn't care for the album either, first time I heard it, until I got into the themes and realized that they all worked together.

The theme of the album is, in proper Floyd fashion, "That which makes one go mad."  So the lyrics speak directly about social pressures and nihilism and lost expectations and war... while the music speaks of the inner state of the mind.  The album goes back and forth between being TOO involved in reality (On the Run, Great Gig in the Sky, Money, Time) and music that speaks of a growing disconnect from reality (Breathe-- a search for peace not found in this world; Us and Them, Brain Damage). 

The keystone of the album, to me, is Great Gig in the Sky, which is on the surface about religion with the gospel voices moaning in ecstasy which moves slowly to screaming agony and then back down again to acceptance.  This is almost orgiastic, speaking possibly of the sexual connection of religious fervor.  But it also speaks to the movement of the mind that is the heart of the album.  The mind realizes the tension it is under until it finally screams under the suffering and agony of reality.  Finally, it just breaks, suddenly, and achieves the peace it had been longing for from the beginning.  But it could only achieve this peace by no longer being associated with reality at all.

So you might see why this album is so powerful to me.  It is an album version of the book of Ecclesiastes, in a sense.  Powerful.
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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #26 on: July 20, 2013, 01:34:20 PM »
I can see someone getting that out of the album, but I just cant find myself quite getting there. There's certainly that tension there and if it is a deliberate choice, it's one that doesn't work for me. There's still a lot to like about the album, and I do think it's good, just not for me. I'm hoping Pink Floyd's other albums work better for me with these second listens because I have friends who are closer to my tastes who care for their other albums much more than this one.

Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #27 on: July 20, 2013, 06:35:37 PM »
Wow, this thread has already inspired a great post from Steve.

oldkid

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #28 on: July 20, 2013, 07:38:26 PM »
Sam, you are just very inspirational.
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Bondo

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Re: Sam Makes a Favorite Albums List
« Reply #29 on: July 20, 2013, 10:54:45 PM »
I consider their first album a high water mark, and they have produced good albums since, but none as good as the first.

Apparently I was talking about their third album If I Left The Zoo, not Eleventh Hour, which is also not their second album.

Even though their stuff is not overtly Christian much of the time, I imagine my appreciation has waned slightly over the years alongside my faith.