I thought it was finally time to take a deep breath and give this a go yesterday. I'm not going to give my thoughts on every individual track, because there's near-30 of the feckers, and nobody has time to read that.
The first track is...I don't even know what it is.
The first minute of Jail actually had me feeling a tinge of optimism that there may be some good in this album. But then, it just doesn't go anywhere. There's a good song in there somewhere, but it sounds like he jumped into recording that when he had, say, a quarter of the song. He had idea 1, but should have waited for ideas 2,3 and 4 before finishing it. It's the most frustrating thing on the album for me because you're waiting for something to happen next, but then it just doesn't. The ultimate insult is that there's a part 2 to Jail, which...is another 5 minutes of nothing. The frustrating thing is that it could have been something. You're about a minute or a minute and a half into the song and you have the inclination to believe that it's going to move on, or the drums will kick in, or some other new exciting element will be added...but nope.
Unfortunately, I found the rest of the album like that. It's...just very dull. There's no movement there. It's quite empty and doesn't really have a place. There's no catharsis there, no singalong factor, no ability to dance to it or nod your head to it, and other special moments. There are small ideas littered throughout the album, but no "whole" ideas.
I have to talk about the amount of writers and producers because...it's utterly, fecking ridiculous. Jail alone has 8 writers and 6 producers. How?! Hurricane has 13 writers and 7 producers...The section on the album's wikipedia where they list the writers and producers is like an essay! When you take all of that into consideration, the amount of people, talent, and how expensive that must have made it to put together, this is nothing but disappointing. You would expect a lot more than what is on the record. I wouldn't even class it as minimalism or stripped back. How can you have that amount of personnel working on an album and class it as minimalism. It's failed extravagance.
My thoughts on the album length and how this hinders the replayability remain the same. I'm in no rush to go through all of that again, for seemingly little reward.
The first track is...I don't even know what it is.
The first minute of Jail actually had me feeling a tinge of optimism that there may be some good in this album. But then, it just doesn't go anywhere. There's a good song in there somewhere, but it sounds like he jumped into recording that when he had, say, a quarter of the song. He had idea 1, but should have waited for ideas 2,3 and 4 before finishing it. It's the most frustrating thing on the album for me because you're waiting for something to happen next, but then it just doesn't. The ultimate insult is that there's a part 2 to Jail, which...is another 5 minutes of nothing. The frustrating thing is that it could have been something. You're about a minute or a minute and a half into the song and you have the inclination to believe that it's going to move on, or the drums will kick in, or some other new exciting element will be added...but nope.
Unfortunately, I found the rest of the album like that. It's...just very dull. There's no movement there. It's quite empty and doesn't really have a place. There's no catharsis there, no singalong factor, no ability to dance to it or nod your head to it, and other special moments. There are small ideas littered throughout the album, but no "whole" ideas.
I have to talk about the amount of writers and producers because...it's utterly, fecking ridiculous. Jail alone has 8 writers and 6 producers. How?! Hurricane has 13 writers and 7 producers...The section on the album's wikipedia where they list the writers and producers is like an essay! When you take all of that into consideration, the amount of people, talent, and how expensive that must have made it to put together, this is nothing but disappointing. You would expect a lot more than what is on the record. I wouldn't even class it as minimalism or stripped back. How can you have that amount of personnel working on an album and class it as minimalism. It's failed extravagance.
My thoughts on the album length and how this hinders the replayability remain the same. I'm in no rush to go through all of that again, for seemingly little reward.