I find the amount of overwhelming praise for this album absolutely ridiculous. It has some obvious, glaring flaws which I will show you. Let's get into it. The whole thing SOUNDS great (wonderful production and choice of everything, really) BUT the song structures are often weak and the melodies are pretty mediocre at points. When you break down the songs themselves they often are very I find the amount of overwhelming praise for this album absolutely ridiculous. It has some obvious, glaring flaws which I will show you. Let's get into it. The whole thing SOUNDS great (wonderful production and choice of everything, really) BUT the song structures are often weak and the melodies are pretty mediocre at points. When you break down the songs themselves they often are very blase and repetitive. Some songs even putter out in the middle and just cruise to the endpoint. Like he just didn't know where to go with the song and just said it, I'll just extend the current part for 2-3 minutes and add in a couple solos. They won't notice'. Some entire songs are like that. When you get past all the gorgeous sounds there's not an awful lot of meat on these bones. I will say that 'apocalypse dreams' and 'elephant' are wonderful. 'Gotta be above it' is great too. The rest is ok but it's too repetitive to last for me.



Now I'm going to talk about random songs



'Mind Mischief' is pretty good. It relies heavily on effects and studio trickery like many of the other songs but it definitely works on this one. The melodies are good too and the song itself 'travels' just enough to satisfy. Don't think I'll be coming back to it that often but it's good.



'Music to Walk Home By' could have been immense. I can easily see how this song could have just launched into a whole 'nother dimension but it doesn't really travel far. It's still ok to good but again, repetitive (without very strong melodies to fancy it up).



'Why won't they talk to me' is SO ****ing annoying. How many times do we really need to hear the chorus ffs (it's not that amazing to begin with) and if he is going to reach a 'cathartic' moment of realization by saying "But I don't even care about it anyway. I wouldn't listen to a word any of them say. They just talk about themselves all day. One day Ill be a star and they'll be sorry" then he shouldn't ruin that moment by relegating back to the chorus which makes it seem like he doesn't really believe what he just said. For listeners relating to his experience this could have been therapeutic but instead it just wallows in self-pity and shallow fantasies of revenge.



'Feels like we only go Backwards' is the biggest mistake here. They took what could have been an amazing song (with the addition of a part or 2) and just REPEAT THE out of the chorus. That is basically the whole song. It sounds gorgeous and has strong melodies so it is still 'good' though it wears out its welcome quicker because of the overbearing repetition.



'Keep on lying' is like they took 5 seconds of music and just looped it, threw on some OK guitar and organ solos/drones and called it a song.



Anything I didn't mention is pretty much OK to 'blah'. I'd give it a 6 based on the strength of the better songs.



I hear some people throwing around the word masterpiece which is just ridiculous. Something like 'Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots' or even the Ruby Suns 'Sea Lion' is much closer to a psych-pop masterpiece than this. … Expand