Chorus.fm Members EOTY Lists 2021 • Page 7

A Great Big Pile of Leaves is my number one. Surprised even with lists of 30 plus people still haven't listed them. Such a fun album.

 

a good list

 

the last few years a majority of my favorite albums have been pop or pop-leaning, a lot of really exciting things have been happening in that genre over the last 5 or so years. This year though, very light on pop or pop-adjacent albums that I was big on.

I've mentioned how a lot of artists released more downtempo albums after dealing with the pandemic, and it's totally understandable, but it's certainly led to a lack of big pop albums. Also, I still feel like some bigger artists are holding onto big albums until they can tour on them, which seems to be ramping up in 2022.

Anyway, for the first time in a few years my list isn't fully stacked with pop or pop-adjacent albums as much, just a personal thing I've noticed!

 

i wonder if it’s pandemic fueled or just the trendy thing to do (I lean towards that one given the statures of the artists and producers who all hard pivoted in that direction and the general critical publication reception of those albums), but I generally agree.

I still have a decent bit of pop adjacent music on my list (mainly on the alt-pop side) but its not necessarily the names I expected — if you would have told me at the beginning of the year that Lorde, Billie Eilish, St Vincent, Kacey Musgraves, and probably a few more I’m forgetting off hand would have all released albums that missed my list and I would have had that the same high level complaint about all of them, I wouldn’t have believed you

 

love that record!

 

yep, I am exactly the same as you. All 4 artists that you listed were artists that I figured would be shoo ins, but here we are and I don't really like any of them

 

Olivia Rodrigo, Silk Sonic, ELIO, Griff, Bieber (unfortunately his album is great haha), HONNE, Oh Wonder, Remi Wolf are the ones that are the most pop leaning that stuck with me

 

nice! I’ve got Oh Wonder and Remi Wolf high on my list too. Olivia and Bieber and HONNE were solidly likes (Olivia probably would have been pretty high on my list if there were either slightly fewer ballads or if the slower songs didn’t run together for me), and I’ll need to check out Silk Sonic (which I’ve been meaning to do since it came out and keep forgetting) and ELIO and Griff

Orla Gartland, CHVRCHES, London Grammar, YONAKA, and Twenty One Pilots (my “guilty pleasure” album I didn’t expect to like nearly as much as I did) are the other pop-leaning things I have top 25 or so

 

ELIO and Griff are both EPs so they are super easy listens, ELIO particuarly is "one to watch" the whole EP is fucking greattttt

I don't know Orla or YONAKA, will check those out! I won't listen to 21Pilots though haha

 

1. Foxing – Draw Down The Moon
2. Manchester Orchestra – The Million Masks of God
3. Deafheaven – Infinite Granite
4. The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore
5. Tyler, The Creator – Call Me If You Get Lost
6. Circa Survive – A Dream About Love
7. Every Time I Die – Radical
8. One Step Closer – This Place You Know
9. Eidola – The Architect
10. Low – Hey What
11. King Woman – Celestial Blues
12. DJ Seinfeld – Mirrors
13. Lana Del Rey – Blue Banisters
14. Flight Mode – TX, ‘98
15. Turnstile – Glow On
16. Ross From Friends – Tread
17. Thrice – Horizons/East
18. Woman is the Earth – Dust of Forever
19. Pooh Shiesty – Shiesty Season
20. Holy Other – Lieve
21. Mortiferum – Preserved In Torment
22. Halsey – If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
23. Koreless – Agor
24. The Dirty Nil – Fuck Art
25. The Armed – Ultrapop

 

amazing albums and easily my top ten
1. Backxwash - I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES
2. Origami Angel - GAMI GANG
3. The World is a Beautiful Place - Illusory Walls
4. CVRCHES - Screen Violence
5. Tigers Jaw - I Won’t Care How You Remember Me
6. Kississippi - Mood Ring
7. Hit Like A Girl - Heart Racer
8. Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
9. Foxing - Drawn Down the Moon
10. Lil Nas X - MONTERO

harder to rank
11. Kali Masi - [laughs]
12. Arrange - The World is Racing
13. Kacey Musgraves - star-crossed
14. Grayscale - Umbra
15. R.A.P. Ferreira - The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures
16. Mach-Hommy - Pray For Haiti
17. The Dirty Nil - Fuck Art
18. Home is Where - I Became Birds
19. The Maine - XOXO: From Love and Anxiety in Real Time
20. Parannoul - To See the Next Part of the Dream

 

Star Crossed has some good songs. But it feels like such a massive departure from Golden Hour in terms of completeness. I don’t think there is a single track on Star Crossed that comes close to anything on GH.

 

Idk, I think "Hookup Scene" is a better song than at least half of what's on Golden Hour, and I adore Golden Hour.

 

Really? I can't think of many things I like about hookup scene, barely recognize it by name.

 

Serious question: How many times did you listen to this album? I always wonder this when someone tries to pass off “I don’t even remember what that sounds like!” as a valid criticism.

“Hookup Scene” has a lovely melody and the kind of understated vocal performance from Kacey that most of her best songs have, IMO (“Merry Go Round,” “Miserable,” “Somebody to Love,” etc.) The Grammys and most publications have gravitated toward the more “obvious” divorce songs from the album (“Camera Roll,” “Justified,” “Breadwinner”) but “Hookup Scene,” to me, comes from a more vulnerable and less oft-explored place. Ending a marriage/relationship, feeling like you’re escaping into this realm of freedom that you thought you wanted, then realizing the dating culture sucks and regretting what you lost…and then missing that person, but maybe missing them for the wrong reasons…I just think it’s a really rich, nuanced breakup song. A really honest, thoughtful piece of songwriting, when most people wanted her to go scorched earth.

 

Didn't like 80% of Golden Hour because it was too pop (I love country Kacey), haven't even listened to the new one

 

Hookup Scene is great. Star-Crossed is probably my favourite song on that album.

 

i like hookup scene probably most off of star-crossed but i think i’d estimate i like probably 80% of golden hour songs more than it. i don’t think what steve said is that off base.

 

To my ears 'If This Was A Movie' is the most Golden Hour thing on Starcrossed

Surprised that song doesn't get more love

 

Honestly I think I'd take any song on Star-Crossed over Velvet Elvis.

 

To be clear, I'm not saying that Star-Crossed is above criticism. It's probably her weakest album on the whole. I just think saying "I can't remember what that sounds like" 95 percent of the time has more to do with the listener than it does the music. I couldn't tell you what anything from that Weather Station album sounds like either, but that's because I listened to it 2-3 times. I don't think that's really a reflection of that album's quality or value or even its memorability, since a lot of people obviously love it (given that it's been on almost every list). I just personally didn't feel inspired to give it a lot of time. Hence why I'm curious how many times Steve went back to Star-Crossed after his initial disappointed reaction.

 

I think I'm sensitive about this because it really seems like music discourse moves on from most new albums after 1-2 weeks, and I wish that wasn't the case.

 

I agree with that. I have tried to consume music according to this Jay Z quote ever since I heard him say it

“It’s up to the individual to figure out how to slow it down because, you know, it’s just going faster and faster, everything moving quicker, information is going quicker. [...] These great things are fleeting, they’re going faster and faster, and it’s up to the individual to slow it down and be like ‘okay, I’m living with this album, this is what I choose to ride to, this is gonna be the soundtrack to my life for the next couple of months’”.

 

I love this.

That idea, of committing to living with an album and letting it be a soundtrack for a few months, is definitely something that matters to me. I made the conscious decision a few years back to listen to a little less (I used to be super into tracking everything I listened to in the Album Lists threads here and seeing how many records I could hear in a year) but to spend a little more time with the stuff that mattered to me. I found that I would listen to all this music, and then spend a ton of time making my year-end lists...only to not really have a huge emotional connection to a lot of the stuff on those lists a few years later.

Now, I'm sure I miss things. But I definitely feel more tied to the albums I love, more like I was when I was young and listened to albums over and over and over again because I only had so many dollars to spend on a CD every month or two.

 

it's the same with movie and tv criticism lately, too, fwiw