Halsey- The Great Impersonator (October 25, 2024) Album • Page 11

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I don't know, just one example (some of "Dog Years" did the same to me) and I can't explain why it specifically bothers me with their music so much (I have generally enjoyed each project of theirs more than the last) but I'm glad it works for you

 

"Dog Years" makes more sense to have that reaction to me, lol. I personally adore that song, but it's playing around with both heavy, blunt feelings and the whole dog angle in ways that I'm bounce off of a lot of people. When you said parts of this made you cringe, I 100% thought you meant that one, not somehow her thinking she'd be dead at 27, lol.

 

It's just, like...projection of the whole 27 club thing. Idk. Like I said, glad it works for some people, just a little self-serious for me lol.

 

now i'm having flashbacks to how Lana Del Rey supposedly had an obsession with death around her 27th birthday

 

Idk, "27 club" shit can be corny and overly glamorize what shouldn't be glamorized, but also... Halsey actually has a past with mental illness and the like that included having attempted to take her own life. And, the entire album is very directly about looking back at her younger self now that she's a mother with various physical ailments, and feeling all sorts of things about that irony and foolishness. So, if you don't like that whole "27 club" thing, that line within the context of the album actually agrees with you! lol.

 

While I like this album AND simultaneously agree with a decent amount of the Pitchfork review, I do think it's funny that they're like "nothing here sounds like it was produced by Alex G" and that opening track literally could have been pulled from God Save the Animals lol

 

Synth tone and percussion on "Letter to God (1983)" is 100% "I'm on Fire" by Bruce.

 

Kind of petty to target the reviewer like that.

 

it’s always so cringy to me when artists get upset with pitchfork lol

 

Yikes, artists lashing out at critics is beyond fucking cringe.

 

I went through it with MB of Say Anything, but that turned into a meaningful conversation and I don't really foresee that happening here lol. MB also doesn't have millions of stans online that could attack/doxx me. Art is personal and I definitely understand them having a reaction to a negative review, but...that's part of being an artist. Have someone on your team soften the blow somehow. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Especially when it appears the majority of other reviews have been largely positive.

 

That’s stupid

 

Slated to land at #2, 90k. Tyler, The Creator #1 at 250k.

 

in retrospect, that's probably not a wise choice on their part. bare minimum, they could've done without naming the reviewer.

 

yeah, they were never topping Tyler

 

After discounting the record to 4.99 and releasing 4 special editions she only got to 90k? This thing is going to crash hard next week.

I really love some of their songs, they’ve just never been able to put together a whole album together.

The marketing on this thing really screwed her…using the legends and they saying they influenced the tracks, only to have them sound not much like those inspirations at all.

 

Except for the two that sound like carbon copies of artists they're pulling from lol

 

it seems to be a combination of two factors: Tyler's popularity, and the fact that Halsey's fanbase probably doesn't have the same dedication to buying multiple digital copies of the same record as the Swifties or other similar groups. as annoying as it is that Taylor uses this method, at least she's been more adamant about marketing each new version as having a missing piece of the larger puzzle (and has been for a long time). i don't think Halsey started utilizing this method until IICHLIWP, which was already set to have lower sales than their past 3 albums (given the nature of the album and the lack of pre-release singles), and even with those efforts, it still had to unexpectedly go up against Donda.

idk. this might've topped the charts if Tyler dropped another week, but i also don't think the demand for a new Halsey album has ever been high enough to push them past a bigger artist by discounting the album.

 

Tyler also did it with 3 less days because he thinks people rush to listen to albums at midnight which kills the vibe

And he's completely right

 

The marketing thing is so funny to me.

Like, she’s clearly just having fun paying tribute to her favs. When she did Evanescence for “Lonely is the Muse,” someone said they were surprised it wasn’t Deftones, and Halsey said basically said they’re not meant to all be that direct (and joked that doing Chino wouldn’t have the same impact, lol). With the variety of the initial songs, I expected something different, too, but also… it was an incredibly easy mental realignment to be like, “oh, that’s not what this is. Cool.”

Granted, I’m a comic book fan, and the corporate superhero corner of that industry is full of actively bad marketing, lol. So, maybe I’m just primed to take big marketing gimmicks with a grain of salt.

I do still think there’s still a level of intentionality to this whole “great impersonator” thing that I’ll have to tease out as I continue to listen to this. There’s something to all these costumes; it’s just not consistently so literal or whatever, and more just vibes.

 

music fans today are so soft: the mildest (and oftentimes legit) criticism from pitchfork turns them into frenzied psychos

 

unsurprisingly Ronald McDonald gave this a 1/10

 

His review is on another level of bad lol, apparently said they were suffering from "main character syndrome" and some other shit

 

I've actually seen him getting dragged for it, as he should be