not super my jam, but pretty good and they’ve improved with each album. personal all the time, which wears, and it’s always pretty anxious, which wears. mostly I get frustrated with them because basic songwriting is clearly good, but they always add in stuff that feels more to me like effects than music, and it’s just annoying
EDIT1: even reading my initial notes I’m surprised I ranked them A. Brought them down to B because the stuff that was bothersome just got louder than the stuff that was enjoyable
RELISTEN1: there is a lot about them I do like. I think the base songwriting is solid, I think they make good melodies and whatever else you need for solid pop, but their production kills me. It’s just so much, it’s aggressive and it’s so heavy handed. Big, loud, attention-grabbing, chunky production effects. It distracts from what I would otherwise like quite a lot, I think. I think it says a lot that, after listening to a lot of both for a long time, this is still the complaint that I’m making about AJR, but I’ve eased off of it for Jacob Collier. I don’t always dislike AJR’s effects, I just think they’re more often distracting than anything else, especially when I tend to actually really like their less cluttered stuff.
I like each album more than the last, excepting the fifth album which I don’t like very much. The thing that’s rough about the fifth album is that it does way less of the weird and awkward and plentiful sound effects, and I also don’t like it as much. The songs are less fun and interesting, and it continues to lean hard into themes and attitudes that I just do not care for. So much of what they write about feels so childish, and as it continues to stay childish album after album and year after year, it starts to feel almost infantile. I understand cashing in on adolescent anxieties and the fear of growing up. I understand feeling those things for yourself, genuinely and intensely, when you are also an adolescent. But for that to be one of your primary things as you enter your 30s? Come on, man. I’m over it, I am so over this being all you can write about. How are you not over writing about this? These are smart, educated guys. Adam’s got a PhD, for heaven’s sake. How are anxious ramblings and childish whinings still all you can do?
I think I’m gonna do a tiny move, just one spot up, above Ariana Grande. There is a lot that I do like them for, but I can’t go higher than that because they just bug me too much. Gugh. I want them to stop being so anxious about growing up and just grow up. I think maybe then I can actually like them. Time will tell
tunafruitsandwitch 