159: Destiny’s Child (A-)

Destiny’s Child in tier list

for the first and last album mostly I was just bored. Christmas album is pretty good for what it is, even if I don’t like what it is. Albums two and three are both really quite solid, good albums both, I think. All around I like them more than I thought I would. I think I thought they’d sound repetitive and boring and empty. Repetitive, often kinda basic percussion hooks with some one phrase ostinato guitar part playing over and over. That formula isn’t even innacurate, I don’t think, I think it’s fair to say that the meat of most of these songs is a short hook on loop with vocals on top. Which is a really hard sell for me, because I really like music that sounds, well, musical. Music is more interesting and pleasant with a thoughtful melody and interesting harmony, and that is just not offered in the instrumentation of this style, the musicality is very sparse, it’s mostly percussive. What I severely underestimated was the vocals. And like, yeah, duh, R&B is about the vocals, I’m dumb, I get it. But the degree to which musical richness, again in particular with regard to melody and harmony, is created here within the vocals alone, was unexpected and impressive to me. That is to say, I knew that that’s what the plan was, I knew roughly that that’s what was going to happen, I knew that’s what they were going to do- I just didn’t think they’d be quite so good at it. So yeah, for albums 2 and 3 I’m unexpectedly impressed, for the rest I’m expectedly meh. Overall I think I do like them, I think low A- is appropriate