AfterHours
Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)
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- #11
- Posted: 01/18/2020 04:28
- Post subject:
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| RoundTheBend wrote: | | AfterHours wrote: | | RoundTheBend wrote: | 
No - not for Appetite.
That was for Sea Change.
I find Appetite pretty lame. |
Nice try but you closet AFDFs (Appetite For Destruction Fanboyz) can't fool me!
***Ok - joke finally ends***
While Id choose many other albums over Sea Change in that regard, I did revisit it yesterday and it remains a solid effort. Even if I would say it's a bit overrated, it's not hard to see what others see in it. I find something like Neil Young's Harvest or Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, for starters, to both be way more emotional/moving/powerful alternatives with comparable (or comparable enough) aims/aesthetic. |
I totally missed how those albums have heart-wrenching lyrics of loss and desperation the entire album. I'll have to read the lyrics I guess, which I didn't notice. I also felt like they weren't as slow and painful, just like the sting of depression. |
I wasnt referring to them as carbon copies -- simply comparable. Usually when a work is a more in depth or multi-dimensional portrait of emotion(s)/concept(s) as another it tends to leave behind or incorporate additional elements over the other and carve a more unique, individual path. So the similarities are more in the main overall aim or tones and partially in terms of genre/musically. Particularly vocally, Drake and Young have a lot more expressive creativity (individuality) with more substance and allusion -- regardless of lyrics. Outside of a few tracks on Five Leaves Left where there is some mild rhythmic bounce in the step and some elusive mildly wistful respite, Drake's voice is often so depressed that it seems past the point of no return, "staring into the abyss", the instrumentation and chamber orchestra as well: lugubrious, existential and often very grave. Much of the album is staring into this abyss, forlorn, on the precipice of suicide, the music even though very pretty almost always also fraught with a "deathly" or precarious tone and stasis -- "precariously looking out or stepping just off the edge as if to taste the idea of death".
Young's voice (with Dylan) is perhaps the most honest (and among those with the least affectation) in all of rock history, in that in every nuance of his tone, is his despondence, his inward search, his yearning for redemption; in that weathered/breaking register, one can hear pieces of himself falling apart as he attempts to reconcile/redeem his decline. More than "singing", his is a broken heartfelt conveyance with no filter. He plays his guitar in a style that might be likened to "self-flagellation" (though much more fully developed on Everybody Knows This is Nowhere) in that his chords/rhythmic thrusts and lead passages sound like acts of violence or frustration or burden back unto and into himself (he "stabs" or "hits" the notes in such a way as to pull them back in a reverse strike or needling, so that whether lead or rhythm, they will often "self-flaggelate" in a guilt-ridden and introverted passage, often dissonant and ugly, scarred and violent -- as opposed to a showy extroverted, colorful exhibition). He plays harmonica with a similar hurt, of a painful, soul-baring, self-flagellation. Or the piano. All of this leads to expressions of heavy guilt and pain and loss and grief, of a lonely and devastated moral odyssey (that actually find their listless and lonely and wasted apex on Tonight's the Night).
I just mentioned those two for starters. There are many albums that are way more moving/heartbreaking/devastating than Sea Change to me at least (not to mean its not a good album and okay of course if you disagree). The all time (Rock) masterpiece of the sort of emotional loss Sea Change expresses is probably Red House Painter's Down Colorful Hill (again definitely not a carbon copy but fundamentally or roughly within the ballpark in terms of emotional conveyance ... but far more protracted to the point of development into almost an entirely separate music/expression/genre ...and much darker, much more profound). However, that one truly takes no prisoners and one must be attentive enough to its peculiar impressionistic sort of interminable and inconsolable slowcore, in order to assimilate and experience it at the depth it deserves.
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