I don't get this NMH shit, why does /mu/ hate music?
I just find it derivative and weak.
I'm a musician, so I do like the raw engineering …but there's an overuse of cute instruments for the sake of being a "hipster".
They're basically the Wes Anderson of music. A checklist of what's safe and cute, but "cool" and edgy.
Almost as bad as Arcade Fire.
>>60365613
that's a spicy b8
Too many buzzwords to count
Bait inception
Sage
you should make a thread about every album you don't like!
>>60365643
i wrote this just after listening to this album for the first time.
sorry.
let me re-emphasize, i absolutely adore the production on the distorted guitar sounds
>>60365613
>there's an overuse of cute instruments for the sake of being a "hipster".
If this isn't bait just reread this sentence a few times. Then take a nice warm bath and cut open your wrists. Saged, and I don't even like that album very much.
>>60365640
>>60365623
i'm sensitive to gimmicks like mumford and shit
so i'm a little over salted
>>60365640
>Sage
>>60365681
>Saged
enjoi muh downboats, back to /areninecake/ with me
>>60365680
listen to it more, trust us
>>60365769
fuckin wid mu's safespace
>>60365972
>us
sheep
You know how when a singer is singing popular music he or she usually isn't directly on the beat but is slightly out of step with the accompaniment's rhythm? In OAI, if I remember accurately, Mangum tends to hang a little behind the beat on many of the songs ("Blistering pree..." and so on). Contrast with much of ITAOTS, where on the fast-paced numbers like "Two Headed Boy" he's bearing down so heavily that he's almost outrunning his own accompanying, and even on slow tunes like "Oh Comely" the tenseness of the delivery is unwavering and he's hitting the rhythms with militant precision.
In "Two Headed Boy", for instance, he makes extensive use of blues turnarounds and other methods to prolong the resolution so that the first time we hear an authentic V-I cadence isn't until the end of the B section, which is something like 2 full minutes into the song! The effect of such a harmonic structure is to make this resolution uncommonly satisfying and cathartic, since we as listeners to tonal music aren't accustomed to waiting that long, and certainly not in a pop song. This is to say nothing of the modal mixture (a B major chord in a G major key being an example) and other points of interest.
The B chord in "Two Headed Boy" isn't native to the song's key of G major, but that sense of wrongness or strangeness we get upon hearing the non-diatonic chord is part of what makes the harmony expressive and distinctive. Songwriters/composers do that kind of thing all the time; what makes "Oh Comely" worth noting is the decision to begin the song not on the tonic chord, but in the midst of an extended prolongation of the predominant C major, and to top it all off, on a non-diatonic chord. That's the reason "Oh Comely" sounds so anxious and tense, and why the D-G cadence is like a weight off our shoulders when we eventually hear it, because this harmonic framework is incredibly unstable.
>>60366008
An E major chord opens the song, strummed on acoustic guitar in 3/4 with a vaguely menacing swing. E major will become the dominant key for much of the rest of the album. The song is mostly a single-take guitar and vocal performance, with the exception of some doubled vocals and horns that enter later on. In fact, the recording on the album preserves what was meant to be only a test of microphone levels with a few bars (ibid). Instead, Mangum, apparently swept up with the power of the song, plows through its entire duration with a remarkable, emotionally-wrought performance. His voice assumes the timbre of a sorrowful, pained moan. The chord progression consists of E major alternating with C major, but the melody of the first section superimposes E natural minor over the E major chord. Here Mangum’s loud, deep voice dominates the guitar’s tonality, which buries its major thirds by emphasizing the low fifth. Though the major tonality is clear during the instrumental breaks, as he sings the minor vocal melody all but obliterates the major key. This domination reflects the song’s subject matter, which laments the imposition of one force upon another, the invasion of suffering where it does not belong.
>>60366026
At the outset, the speaker seems to be anticipating the death of a loved one: “Oh comely / I will be with you when you lose your breath.” This foreboding is akin to the feelings Mangum experienced as he read Anne Frank’s diary. In an interview shortly after the album’s release, he recalled, “I pretty much knew what was going to happen. But that’s the thing: you love people because you know their story” (McGonigal, 1998, pp. 21-22). He expressed frustration that he could feel so close to someone who eventually “gets disposed of like a piece of trash” (ibid). Here, the word “comely” is surrounded by ugliness and decay, just as Anne was a beautiful presence amidst an abhorrent tragedy. Next, the key shifts to G major as the speaker briefly reflects on the contentment of the past: “Chasing the only meaningful memory you thought you had left / [...] It isn’t as pretty as you’d like to guess / In your memory.” The G major key is reminiscent of the relative happiness of the previous few songs—the joy of the title track, the comforting pathos of “Two-Headed Boy,” the celebration of “Holland, 1945,” and the explorative, escapist fantasy of “Communist Daughter”—which are themselves already fading into vaguely pleasant memories under the weight of “Oh Comely.” Likewise, Anne often used nostalgia as a crutch, but her memories only produced temporary relief, which in turn quickly subsided into melancholy. As the key shifts back to the E major/minor hybrid, Mangum proclaims, “It doesn’t mean anything at all,” as if to say that the unrequited longing Anne endured as she suffered to prolong her life was pointless since she died before it could be satisfied.
>>60366041
It's the flowering of a truly original artist's voice, with Mangum's text, composition, and performances surpassing all preceding efforts; it is the first true rock "concept album" to succeed holistically - and not merely succeed, but flourish - prompting a reexamination of that idiom by many; it's one of the rock music's most artistically significant statements from the 1990s, perhaps even ever.
>>60365613
mangum wes and arcade fire
3 of my favorite things bitch
i'm not even white suburban hipster
>>60366121
okay i'm listening to their other albums in order sequence
>there's an overuse of cute instruments for the sake of being a "hipster".
this was released in 98. hipster wasn't a thing.
listen to Avery island or Ferris wheel on fire, they're just as good and more distorted
>>60365613
it's like you took five different arguments from five different shitposts about this album and tried to mash them all together
and if you're serious, no one cares that you don't like NMH
>>60365613
If this was the Wes Anderson of music then I might not hate it so much
>ITB WAABBB MI TASTEE! XD
Yeah this album is good, but it's not close to being the elder god meme of memes tier album that everyone makes it out to be.
This album was proto-hipster. Everything that sounds hipster now is merely taking cues from it
>>60365613
It's garbage meme music, and I'm tired of seeing it spammed here every fucking day. Same with shit like Joanna Newsom, Death Grips, and all the other shit that's constantly posted.
>>60367822
>hipster wasn't a thing
Hipsters were a thing since the 50s, guy. Back then they were referred to as Hep Cats and listened to jazz like smug white motherfuckers in New York.
Some things still haven't changed.
