Records
14 album reviews.
Written in Chinese, each with a machine-assisted English translation.
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Carrie & Lowell
Sufjan Stevens
The picture this album brings to mind is of someone at home at the end of summer, going through old photos.
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Javelin
Sufjan Stevens
What draws me most to Javelin is the relationship between Sufjan’s voice and the sounds around it. He still sings very softly, and sometimes at the end of a line it feels like his breath is about to scatter along with it. But the accompaniment doesn’t always stay quiet with him. The drums suddenly get heavy, electronic sounds break in, the harmonies pile up until one person’s whisper turns into a crowd singing together.
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Blue Weekend
Wolf Alice
The opening track, The Beach, lowers the volume first. The piano repeats, the vocals pile up slowly, and once the band comes in, the question that started out hesitant is finally asked loudly enough. The lyrics touch on friends, relationships, and whether you can become a burden to other people. That hesitation, set against a sound that gets thicker and thicker in the second half, gives the album weight from the very start.
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Chemtrails Over the Country Club
Lana Del Rey
White Dress: Lana puts her voice in a very high, thin place, and some words are almost squeezed out on the breath. After getting used to the calm she has in her low register, hearing this song, you feel she has suddenly become a little clumsy, and also very close.
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Preacher’s Daughter
Ethel Cain
It is hard to explain it with just the word “like”. Some of the sounds are so beautiful I can’t bear to turn them off, and other places make me want to shy away by instinct. Once you know how the story ends, the bright-sounding songs before it change too. American Teenager is still so good to listen to, and Thoroughfare is still so open, but I can no longer fully believe them.
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Pretty. Odd.
Panic! at the Disco
Pretty. Odd. has the feeling of music made with a lot of joy. There are many instruments and many melodies, and often just as I’ve remembered one line, another harmony or some brass pops up next to it. It’s occasionally a bit too full, but that eagerness to keep putting new ideas in makes it hard for me to dislike it.
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The Clearing
Wolf Alice
After listening to The Clearing, the first thing I remembered was Ellie’s voice. Of course Wolf Alice always relied on her before, but back then the noise of the guitars, the drums that suddenly sped up and her low spoken lines always competed for attention together. This time she stands further forward. Many songs are built around the piano, and the outline of the melody is very clear. She has to hold up all those emptied spaces by herself, and she really does.
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Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
Ethel Cain
Preacher’s Daughter gave Willoughby too heavy a place. He became almost all the good lives Ethel could imagine having. This prequel finally lets the two of them spend real time together, and it made me realize that the love she keeps longing for was never very secure from the start.
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Death in the Business of Whaling
Searows
Searows’ voice has a very particular sense of distance. He sings softly, yet he isn’t far away, as if he has already come to stand in front of you and just doesn’t want to say the words loudly. Death in the Business of Whaling enlarges the instruments around him, and this trait becomes even more obvious. The drums and guitars can get very heavy, and his voice still keeps its fragile edge.
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Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd
Lana Del Rey
Parts of this album don’t sound like finished songs. The voice is still practicing, a sentence turns somewhere else halfway through, and after a very private memory a joke suddenly follows that leaves you baffled. Lana hasn’t tidied these things up to look especially presentable. After listening for a while, I felt that this untidiness suits what she wanted to write about this time.
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How to Be a Human Being
Glass Animals
How to Be a Human Being is very good at making you like a song first, and only slowly realize that the person in it isn’t doing well. The drums, the bass and the strange sound effects are all very appealing, and Dave Bayley always sings very softly, so a lot of unpleasant things get mixed into the nice-sounding melodies this way.
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I Love You So F***ing Much
Glass Animals
The most obvious change on this album is that the songs have gotten bigger. The choruses have to climb very high, the synthesizers are spread wide, and the drums are more direct. Before, Glass Animals would use some strange little sounds to draw attention to the corners; this time a lot of things gather around the most eye-catching melody. It sounds smooth, and the memorable parts come quickly.
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Son of Spergy
Daniel Caesar
Daniel Caesar is very good at singing so that it sounds like an offhand remark. The volume isn’t high, and the vocal runs may not be especially showy, but once he opens his mouth, the instruments seem to step back a little on their own. Son of Spergy still has this pull, only this time he doesn’t keep himself at the center of a romance the whole time. He starts looking more seriously at his father, and at what he has inherited from his father.
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MEmento·MORI
珂拉琪
There are many more people before and after that sorrow. Some are leaving, some are waiting for someone who will not come back, and some have already died but still can’t let go of things from when they were alive. By the second half of the album, another language sounds, and the memories of other families are brought in. The album is very short, but the relationships it holds are complicated.
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