solid, not always my jam but solid
RELISTEN1: definitely liking it better than I did the first time around. It’s really quite good. I think at this point it mostly is always my jam; there are few to no songs I don’t like, the albums as albums are great, and there are a bunch of songs that I really really love. Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night I think is probably the weakest album— that’s not really a criticism, that’s praise. That’s still a good album, just not as much as the others. Bleachers, the fourth album, is great. Probably the most solid album all around, with many songs I really really like. None that are my favorite, I think Gone Now has higher highs, but really really solid.
It’s interesting listening to Bleachers because Antinoff has become so pervasive in modern pop. He writes and produces for so many people, for Swift, Lana Del Rey, Olivia Rodrigo, Clairo, Sara Bareilles. His sound has in many ways become the sound of this period of time. It’s not hard to tell which Swift songs were written by him by listening for a few seconds. It’s not hard to hear his influence in the music he hasn’t written that’s being produced. I genuinely believe that, in terms of production style and songwriting values, we’re kind of living in an Age of Antinoff.
That’s not to say that there isn’t stuff that doesn’t sound like him; just that he’s a major, maybe the major, influence on the style of our day. So listening to Bleachers is like getting that straight from the source, a distilled version of it. And I like it, it makes sense to me that it would become the standard. It’s consistent but still leaves space for artistic license, it’s interesting but maintains a core of pleasantness and enjoyability. It’s really good, A+
tunafruitsandwitch 