yeah okay, I like this, and I think I like it more the more I listen to it. Each album I think is getting better, or at least moving forward. The first two albums, Shelter and Save You/Save Me, are both unavailable commercially. There was a lineup change within the band and some other reorganizing and rebranding so they took ‘em down (I pulled ‘em from YouTube). But they were still made, they’re still a relevant part of the band and their history. And they’re not bad. Shelter I think shows a lot of potential—it’s not quite where I’d need it to be to really be enjoyable, but it’s got good bones. Songs are definitely longer than they need to be, such that they would often have a part or two in them that would be engaging and delightful, but those parts would get lost in the mire. Not that it’s really the mire, it’s still alright, but it ends up being nothing special. Save You/Save Me cleans up a lot. It’s a little more streamlined and refined, I think it selects for what they were already doing a good job at and grabs more of that pretty well.
Then you’ve got their “official” albums. All of them are good albums, and on each one I feel they are yet again getting better, moving forward. The music can be loud, screamy, punchy, and overall pretty aggressive, but I don’t get bad feelings from it. I know that in the past I’ve been frustrated by music that gets too screamy, but this is mostly dodging that for me. I think part of it is that it’s not altogether uncommon in these types of bands for screaming to take over and become almost more important than actual music. That’s not happening here, the screaming isn’t taking over like that. If anything, the screaming is actually secondary— there are lots of songs that, despite their harsh metallic fittings, aren’t so different from a pop song.
The arguably bigger part of why I don’t mind the harshness and screaminess present here is just that I’ve become more accustomed to and tolerant of lots of different types of music. One of the first artists I did was The Libertines. I dinged them considerably for being “alright but harder than I like”. The first half dozen times I listened to Reptilia by The Strokes, I wouldn’t add it to my library because even though I liked it, it was too screamy for me. Now I listen to Reptilia and it’s nothing, light work. The Libertines aren’t half as hard of rock as NOTHING MORE, but I don’t feel like NOTHING MORE is too much for me. I’m planning a relisten for the Libertines soon, and I’m super curious to see what I think of them now that my tolerances are so different. Because my tolerances are different, my tastes have changed. There’s so much that I listen to nowadays that I never would have in the past. There’s stuff that Past Pod would have specifically disliked that Current Pod not only tolerates but actively appreciates.
I like the screaming, I like the harsh guitar, I like the drama of it all. I don’t want those things all the time, but I think NOTHING MORE does them all well and uses them to good effect. I like NOTHING MORE more every song and every album, they’re impressive to me. In my head I’m measuring them up against bits of No Party for Cao Dong, bits of Foo Fighter, bits of Paramore. NOTHING MORE isn’t as bright and shiny on the surface as those guys can be, but I think especially as time goes one they develop more pop sensibilities, adapt them into their own style. My ultimate rank placement here comes from the line of reasoning that I don’t think NOTHING MORE is as good as No Party for Cao Dong, but it’s not all that far off. I’m happy to give an A for this, this is a winner for me
tunafruitsandwitch 
It is clear that you have more experience with this kind of music than I do, and maybe that’s why I did feel like listening to NOTHING MORE was a genuine assault on my insides and you didn’t. I had to just keep turning down the volume lower and lower. It was super hard for me to listen to. I didn’t like the sound, I didn’t like the energy, I didn’t like the lyrics. I couldn’t relate to the thought process in its creation. At the end of the last album there were a few collabs with female singers, and those I liked. I could finally hear the ‘music’. Before I could only hear noise. So maybe it’s my tolerance level, exposure level, and maybe it’s just not my thing. I do, however, appreciate that they might be fine in this genre – so that is why I give NOTHING MORE a D (instead of an F).
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(this was the abbreviated version of the full comment because I didn’t trust myself not to go in guns blazing so soon. I waited half a month, wrote an essay about it, and then decided to post the full comment after all. It’s just beneath this one)
I’d be curious to hear what you think of Spirits (the fourth album) after you listened to it again in a month or two. I think I’d say upwards of 60% of that album felt more like rock (or even pop) songs with metal aesthetics than it did like metal, to me. I wonder what some space, being able to step away from it a little bit, would do to your perception of it.
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I’d be curious to hear what you think of Spirits (the fourth album) after you listened to it again in a month or two. I think I’d say upwards of 60% of that album felt more like rock (or even pop) songs with metal aesthetics than it did like metal. Meaning, even completely disregarding the degree to which I have grown to like parts of that sound that I didn’t use to like, I don’t think the last album presents itself nearly as aggressively as you heard it; I suspect that somewhere in the first album or two (maybe only the first song or two), you heard this sound that was grating and painful for you and shut the rest out, stopped really listening to it.
That’s a bit of an accusation on my end, but I don’t think it’s unfair. I’m drawing from two big pieces of evidence.
First is that you’re my mom. I heard some of your live reactions, I had a bit of a dialogue with you while we were listening toward the beginning. I have records of you texting me very early into day one— I told you I’d be listening to two inaccessible albums that you wouldn’t be, and your response was “Oh yay. They are not my vibe”.
Second is that you present the idea that the significant difference between being able to hear the music vs just hearing noise is just having female singers present. That just doesn’t quite track, because the collaborations aren’t different songs. They aren’t the result of some outside source reigning in the aggressive energies of NOTHING MORE, they’re just songs from the album, from NOTHING MORE, with an additional voice.
What I’m trying to get at, is I don’t know how strongly they even reside in “this genre”. I think you heard things you traditionally have a negative predisposition towards and let those consume your listening, even as they grew dimmer and less present.
I don’t think there’s gonna be some future moment where you listen to NOTHING MORE and go, “Oh my goodness, what was I thinking, this is great! It doesn’t have bad energy at all, all of these lyrics are fine!”. I don’t think you’ll ever actually like them much, if at all. But I do think that the overall impression you ended with was primarily a product of a bias you had against the type of thing you thought it would be, rather than the thing it actually was. Which is totally, genuinely fine. Getting past those biases and first impressions is work, and a lot of the time they’re actually pretty effective. They do a great job of helping you predict what you will or won’t like, they’re useful.
My warning is that I will be listening to more music like this in the future, more of this and more of other things that you will dislike immediately and be predisposed to continue disliking afterward. Assuming you stay with me, that will continue to be unpleasant as long as you resist what you listen to. When it’s unpleasant, don’t turn the volume down until you can barely hear it (but it’s still technically playing near you)— turn the volume up and start asking yourself questions. Responding to dislike with airs of finality is, I think, so much less interesting, fulfilling, and enjoyable than responding with questions and curiosity.
But maybe it’s not, for you. Maybe you think of going through these artists with me as (in addition to being a way to connect with me) a way to figure out which artists you like and which you don’t. If so, you’ll make an excellent control group as we continue to move forward, and it will be interesting to compare how our experience diverges.
Writing out this comment inspired me write this:
It goes into the the more general form of the ideas I’m trying to get to here, if that’s interesting to you.
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