I admit, I’m kinda bummed by this. I was looking forward to it, and the first couple albums had me excited. It’s instrumental, it came into my attention as part of my math rock investigations. I think their first two albums, and also maybe their fourth, are the ones that feel the most “math rock-y” to me, and are the ones I enjoyed the most. It took a bit for me to hear them that way because aesthetically they lean a little bit heavier than the other math rock I’ve listened to thus far, but at this point I think I can hear it pretty well. Their other albums I’m not quite as convinced about. Elements of the math rock feeling are there, but I think I’d be more inclined to call it… I dunno, prog rock? I don’t really know what characterizes prog rock so that’s kinda a stupid thing to say, actually. So, that’s my feeling but with the caveat that the feeling is baseless and I don’t stand by it? Yeah.
Even then, I’m not saying I can’t hear the math rock influence in the later albums, because I can. But, I also feel like it’s aesthetically more different than the other math rock I’ve been listening to. It’s more like instrumental alt rock? Ugh, that’s just as useless as “prog rock”, none of these descriptions mean anything. I’m getting into a type of labeling, a type of attempt at taxonomy that I don’t find enjoyable, interesting, or useful. Why? I’ll back off, it doesn’t matter. All I can really say is that I liked albums 1, 2, and 4, and the other ones I really felt blandly toward.
My favorite album was the second, Phantasia. I liked it substantially more than all of the others—by the time I was halfway through the band it was to the point that I started wondering if I’d actually liked Phantasia more or if I was just getting tired of the band or if I was in a worse mood or what, so I went back and listened to it a third time. Confirmed: I definitely like it way more than Cubic or Multiple or any of those later albums. For pretty math rock-y reasons, too. I feel like it is so dense with counterpoint and polyphony, and those things make for really engaging rhythmic and harmonic sections, it’s a really engaging interweaving of moving parts, I like it a lot.
I don’t think a B- really fits, but I think that’s more because I hate all of my rankings right now. What I wish I had was a system in which I had a set of tags that have the qualitative characteristics that I associate with my tier distinctions, such that I could tag things with “multiple tiers”, so to speak. Then, everything exists as tagged in at least one category, but not only can things be in multiple categories, I wouldn’t need to do comparative evaluations within the categories. My B tier is characterized (not just in this theoretical restructuring—it’s characterized this way now, and it has been for as long as I’ve kept up with this blog) as being where I like the music fine enough but not enough for me to like the artist. My C tier is characterized as where I wish I liked the artist, but they don’t quite make that jump for me because of some glaring or undeniable issue that I can’t get over. I think those are useful characterizations, and I think they make for useful categories that have been incredibly helpful in giving me distinct attributes I can relate my own feelings to in order to make a meaningful judgement about an artist after listening to them. The issue is, those characteristics aren’t mutually exclusive, and though I have it set up as saying that generally, I think B is “better” than C, I don’t think that’s strictly true at all.
Gugh. For now, I’m sticking with a B- for this, but what I wish I could do was place it as a C that is higher than many Bs. Does that make sense? I think it does. It’s been on my mind for a while, now, and I think that’s a decent solution. Implementing it would just be a pain and a half. Anyway. B-, yeah.
LITE complete, now listening to: Nirvana
tunafruitsandwitch 