most of my energy and interest is in the first album. I don’t even love it all that much. I think it’s pretty good, I give it an 8/10 after my third listen, which is high but not crazy high. I don’t have an emotional connection to it. Mostly, I can’t get over how much it strikes me with the feeling that it is capturing the perfect essence of the genre. That doesn’t even really make sense to me, but I feel it.
My first listen through, I mostly thought to myself, “Wow. This somehow sounds like the distilled essence, the very character, of pretty-good-but-not-terribly-good indie pop-rock.” The arrangements, composition, instumentation, harmonic language, it all pointed in that same direction so strongly. Now I know; if somebody asks me, “What is indie-pop, how is that a genre and not just an independent label?” I can point them to this album because it is exactly the sound. My second listen through didn’t change my mind on that, but I did find the album, both individual songs and as a whole, far more compelling. My third listen through I just kept hearing whatever thing I was feeling the first time around. It’s hard for me to pin down how quintessentially… what it is that Nothing Happens feels like to me. It is so much what it is, it’s crazy.
The other stuff after has some familiar feeling, some movement away from that typical sound and exploration into some other kinds of sounds. They’re all pretty good, maybe they’ll grow on me, but none of them really spoke to me and they all felt like they were further from the source than the first album, if that makes any sense. It doesn’t, really. I feel a little bit odd about these guys, I don’t think my experience with them translates well, and it definitely doesn’t write well. Oh well, what can you do. I’ll give a B+, though I’m pretty open to this going up
Wallows complete, now listening to: The Pretenders
tunafruitsandwitch 