The Hotelier - Goodness (May 27, 2016) Album • Page 28

saw them yesterday in Paris, it was so so good. they've really improved since i saw them last year (and it was already great).
Sun is quite the experience live, damn

 

How long was the set? How many new songs they played?

 

i haven't heard a single note of "Sun" but the hype around that song is crazy. i cannot wait to experience that for the first time.

 

Ayyyy I bought tickets to this and convinced my wife and her friend to come with me. I played them Piano Player as my selling point and not Life In Drag lol

 

spoiler alert. don't really discuss songs explicitly (except at the end) but more like my personal experience w/ this record

i've been trying to articulate my thoughts about this album for a while now, and am still failing pretty hard, but i think one thing that contrasts it from a lot of stuff out there is that it's deceptively closed off. that sounds untrue at first because it's so clearly an album about love, an album about community, an album of warmth and welcome and wisdom (lots of w's!!!), but the actual ideas that it presents aren't as immediately accessible as most music. this is something i started noticing recently - i thought mae's (m)orning was a good comparison point for the feel of Goodness, and then i actually went and listened to (m)orning again and while the musical comparison isn't far off (fear of good could actually fit on either (m)orning or (e)vening imo) and both albums do revolve around love, (m)orning is a very simple and accessible and unchallenging (not in a bad way) album thematically and this album couldn't be farther from that.

another thing is that, at least for me, it's really difficult to tell what it means to me, even after a lot of listens. why i enjoy it, how i connect with it, what i think it will mean to me down the road, all of that is still unfolding for me. most records are a lot more immediate than that. this one is taking a while to sink in.

Home, INGO, and a lot of the albums that people immediately forge these really deep connections to (think OTIP, 59 Sound, etc.) revolve around personal stories, experiential details, and ultimately relatability. this album feels, not the opposite of that, but something very different. i don't have the lyrics in a form where i can easily read along while listening, so i might take this back later on, but it feels like the storytelling and characters here serve to communicate ~greater~ general ideas, emotions, aesthetics, etc. rather than existing of their own accord or being the focus on the record (a few exceptions: opening mail & settle the scar)

another thing i'm noticing is a lot more structure. the lyrics conform to meter and rhyme like formal poetry, and they feel (to me) very carefully phrased. sometimes on Home you can hear Christian cramming a lot of words into a shorter melody that doesn't do them all justice, it was urgent and cathartic, like the words just needed to be heard. the lyrics here feel a lot more restrained, not in that they're holding back, but in that the words and the melodies are working more collaboratively. there's a lot more wordplay (sort of like the stuff that goes on in the kid who broke his wrist by the sidekicks). i'm trying to listen more carefully to the pauses in the lyrics and see if they correspond to natural line breaks.

also i haven't listened to this nearly as much as i thought i would. i need to be in a certain state of mind to listen to it or it doesn't make sense to me. that sounds weird but when the record comes out i'll be v curious to see if this is true for other people as well.

other, "smaller" stuff (spoilers !!!!!!!!!):
- two deliverances is the best pop punk song they've ever written. the bassline is sooo0000ooo good
- new arrangement of settle the scar is cool but it’s probably my least favorite song mixing-wise. there’s so much separation between the drums and the rest of the mix, and the vocals lack the visceral quality of the split version
- you in this light sounds even more like d-plan than sun. the sparse sections where the drums take the lead remind me a bit of you are invited, and i know a bunch of people who are going to love it.
- when i first listened to end of reel i kept thinking that i'd heard the “tonight we will celebrate cyclical spin” melody somewhere before. i found out where it's from! it’s v similar to the melody of the verses of this song.

 

if band is reading this thread, sorry for basically being a music writer

 

if the band is reading this thread, hey whats up

 

It was a little over an hour long, 11-12 songs! All Home except Housebroken, piano player and sun, and only weathered from the first album i think, not sure

Everyone was blown away, favorite moment of the show. Beautiful, beautiful song

 

Goodness Pt1 is perfect

 

Yeah I'm surprised to see some people be meh on Goodness pt.1. I love it.

 

Great song

 

Pt. 1 is the song that sold me on this band, I then revisited Home and I love it now.

 

Goodness Pt.1 is the first song I've played and sang on guitar. Feels amazing.

 

I like "Goodness 1" but I'm not that into it. I don't really ever feel like listening to it and I doubt I'll revisit it much when the album's out.

 

I just learned it too! I just started playing a month ago and the song was very easy to pick up.

 

Just learned the song yesterday lol I think it's amazing. It actually flows perfectly after "Piano Player" when I play it on Apple Music.

 

i could see myself playing "Goodness Pt.1" like everytime i listen to Goodness start to finish. but then again i havnt heard the album so i really dont know. like as an opener of sorts...

but ive said this before in here: i think its a top 5 Hotelier song for me at this point

 

I like every song on Home other than " Housebroken" way more than "Goodness 1". Same goes for most of INGO.

 

i mean goodness 1 is a simple acoustic song, that's not even an album (or even an EP!!) track. i barely consider it a full fleshed out song to be judged against the rest of them

 

It is a song though. I'm not saying I expected it to be as good as those, just saying how much I like it. I do really love the ending.

 

When did it become a thing to do the "I like every song on X more than Y"? I feel like that trend has picked up steam recently and I don't really get it. I see it a lot when new songs come out now. It doesn't even really help calibrate taste, as you can like something more than something else and still like that something else a whole lot. It seems like it's supposed to be making the point that a band isn't releasing as good of music as they did in the past, but it doesn't really paint that picture very well — it instead just seems like another way to, I guess, rank and compare songs without discussing the songs themselves.

Every time I read some variation of it, all I think is: I like every green M&M better than every red one, and then keep scrolling hoping for something with more substance. Thankfully there was a really good post up above, which sadly had to be qualified with a "sorry I'm a music writer now", which really bums me out. The statements about writers truly has made me less interested in listening to, and talking about, this band or album.

 

I do that just to put something in relation to the rest of the catalogue. Most times it is to stress my dislike for something in relation to their past material and I guess that's kind of what it is here although I don't dislike the song at all, it's just kind of unremarkable to me. It's usually not the only thing I'll say about a subject and only really used in extreme circumstances since it's pretty rare I'll prefer every song on one album to every song on another.

I'm sure there'll be a lot more musical discussion when people actually have the album though.

 

hey jason, i'm really sorry for bumming you out. i 100% meant it as a joke playing off the fact that i'm doing something that i criticized a few pages back to a greater extent than i've seen any music writer do (talking about this album before everyone else has heard it). in hindsight it was in poor taste and i shouldn't have made it. i value your thoughts about music and enjoy reading them, and i'm sorry i contributed to you feeling that your words aren't valued.

 

I value all written words about music, especially music I haven't heard yet.