UncleJam23

Hey y'all. We're on holiday break here at the GB Album Club. Holidays and family and shit. However, here's a space to write a few thoughts on your favorite album of 2023 if you've got 'em. Was it a thing from this year? Was it a thing from a previous year? What do you got? And hey, if you want to catch up on the cycle thus far, here's what we've done:

• Crime in Stereo is Dead by Crime in Stereo
• Within the Realm of a Dying Sun by Dead Can Dance
• I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen
• The Miraculous Mandarin by Béla Bartók

Anyway, what's your favorite music experience of 2023?

It's hard for me to not group classical music, ballet, and opera in my head as one unit, and it's a unit that I always approach with a little bit of an attitude. On one hand, to stand out in any of these fields, you have to be immensely talented. Depending on which specific medium you're talking about, you need to be able to understand music in its purest form and have a mastery of what your body is capable of communicating to an audience.

On the other hand, all three frequently seem like holdovers from Europe taking over the world and now we consider them high art simply because we haven't thought about it that much. Or we have and we simply don't care. In short, I don't fuck with specifically ballet or opera on a personal level.

All that said, when it comes to classical music, I can stop being an asshole and appreciate it for what it is regardless of the context, and hey, turns out classical music frequently rules, and yeah, The Miraculous Mandarin rules.

I chose to go about this by first reading a summary of the story. A basic summary: Three tramps force a woman to lure in men by dancing in the window so they can rob them. The first two are broke, but the third is the titular miraculous Mandarin. They mug him and try to kill him multiple times, but he only dies once he's allowed to "embrace" the woman. You have noticed a possible red flag or two re: race depending on how you interpret it, but you don't have to read or factor in the story in order to listen to the music.

I then listened to the composition without any video accompanimentand I loved it. It's exciting, it's bombastic, and it never fully lets up. Moreover, it doesn't just sound like the soundtrack to a story. It sounds like a story. Much like any effective narrative, there's build-up and there's release. Moments of high drama and quieter sequences to give the specatcle more heft. When you're listening to the music on its own, the specific beats of the story don't matter because the music does such a good job of mirroring story structure that you can fill in the blanks yourself. And, simply put, it's dope horror classical music shit.

I'm sure @zombiepie can get into more of the specifics, but I had a great time with this, and I'm happy the pot got stirred.

I voted Unity, Embracer, and my write-in would be mass industry lay-offs.

If I was picking a winner, it would be the lay-offs. The industry brought on all this staff during quarantine, and at some point, because it always does, the other shoe was going to drop. But it doesn't make it any less heartbreaking even if we all could see it coming. I have a friend who works at a large studio. Nothing like hearing him say, "It felt like my office got Thanos-ed."

But oh boy the Unity stuff........

Duders! Welcome to the 46th edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! The clubs. The streets. The parties. TikTok. You know what they're all fucking with? One act ballets with an emphasis on horror aesthetics, that's what. And because NOBODY has their finger on the pulse to the extent that the GB Album Club does, that's exactly what we're covering. This week's album is... actually not technically an album, it is a piece of music, and that piece of music is The Miraculous Mandarin by Béla Bartók! This album(?) was selected by @zombiepie, and here are the links he provided:

YouTube(with sheet music):https://youtu.be/Ka8mTjVpkLI?si=uheIGXTFuOt7rHYk

YouTube(with live performance/ballet):https://youtu.be/5PAFCTiyCkI?si=-B1WVPh2DlGDMWTG

YouTube(Live performance no ballet):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhr_QJGzLjg

The GB album club. We gathered in a Discord, we made a pool of albums, and we select one every week at random to listen to and discuss. You like that shit? Then come on down!

I'm only familiar with the beginning of Leonard Cohen's career and the very end. Specifically, the first two folk albums and his very last one, You Want It Darker, all three of which are incredible. So I've been meaning to get around to more of his stuff for years, and at least in terms of popularity, this was the big one. And now that I've finally listened to it, I'm a bit conflicted.

On one hand, I think the overall musical aesthetic of this album is dated. The specific style of synths and the saxophones and the near constant background singers and just how canned some of the instrumental elements feel grounds this album a little too deep into the '80s for me. (Full disclosure: I think the '80s is the worst decade for all art. I'm sorry. I'm sorry!) This isn't to say that I couldn't meet some of the songs on their own terms. In fact, I'd say some of those elements were actively effective, particularly on "First We Take Manhatten." But still. There's only so much '80s I can take.

On the other hand, I feel like you don't come to Leonard Cohen for the musicality so much as the lyrics, and on that front, he doesn't disappoint. I'm more into cynical world-weary Cohen than I am "Suzanne" Cohen, and this is literally the album with "Everybody Knows" on it. Which is to say that I ate a lot of the writing right up.

So, again, I'm torn. There's something undeniably endearing about the album, but for me, the gulf between the quality of the writing and the dated production is a little too wide. I think I like this album, but liking it comes with some many qualifiers and caveats that it almost doesn't feel worth it. There's also a part of me that might be comparing it too much to what came before and what came after. To go from acoustic guitars and modern sounding live instrumentation to the most '80s of synth production is a little much. Moreover, You Want It Darker also carries the weight of his death.

However, even if he were still alive and kickin', this album didn't need to sound this way. But hey, it's got "Everybody Knows."

Favorite Songs: "First We Take Manhatten," "Everybody Knows," "Take This Waltz"

Duders! Everybody knows this is the 45th edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club. Everybody knows that last week, we blackened our rooms and explored our inner corruption with Dead Can Dance's Within the Realm of a Dying Sun. Everybody knows that this week, we abandon our folk influences and embrace modernity and synths with I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen! This album was selected by @pauljeremiah (everybody knows) and you can listen with the links below:

Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/album/3gUw30X6A7WEGcRdv1nFr9?si=tQB5fl7SSAm50bR1IUd86Q

Apple:https://music.apple.com/ie/album/im-your-man/511065875

Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lD43sQBFt949GAYyNubpu6ZR7qLc-NiLk

The Unofficial GB Album Club! We gathered in a Discord to make a pool of albums, and then we chose one album a week at random to listen to and discuss. If that sounds chill to you then come on down!

There was an album from 2017 called Peasant by Richard Dawson (not the Family Feud host). It's a folk concept album where every song centers around a different story in medieval England. Villagers attacked by ogres and witches and stuff like that, accompanied by the appropriate musical accompaniments. It's exactly the kind of thing I'd normally scoff at, but it ended up being one of my favorite albums of that year for one major reason: I appreciate commitment.

For me, art isn't about good or bad. It's about effective or not-effective, and in the end, it doesn't really matter what you put in front of me. I just want to experience whatever it is as far as my emotional core will let me, so if you're going to make a medieval folk album, I want the most medieval ass medieval folk album possible, and goddamn if Richard Dawson doesn't deliver.

I know this isn't a goth album in terms of genre, but I would argue that it is one in terms of aesthetic, and on that realm, Within the Realm of a Dying Sun is the most goth shit ever and I ate it up.

A couple of people in the Album Club discord said that this album sounds like the soundtrack to a horror movie that doesn't exist, and I think that's true. But specifically, it sounds like a very particular kind of horror movie. An '80s horror movie with teenage witches and bad vibes, and not one of the corny ones. I may feel this way because it's so rooted in certain '80s sounds that it probably can't have the same effect it had then as it does now, which is to say nothing of how much music I've heard that sounds just like this that's come out since. But still. The atmosphere of this album is so distinctly '80s horror goth you can almost feel the hairspray landing on your skin.

I should say something that feels like a conclusion here, but the only thing I really got left is that Lisa Gerrard's voice is stunning. She's the woman you've heard singing in many Hans Zimmer scores, and there's a reason she's earned that role is because her voice is as alien and haunting as you'd need without becoming a parody of itself.

And yeah, I loved the shit out of this and I'll be returning to it.

Favorite Songs: "Xavier," "Cantara," "Summoning of the Muse"

Duders! Welcome to the 44th edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! Last week the vibes weren't fully great, but there was at least some guitars to rock out to offset the melancholy of the lyrics. This week, however, it's full blown party city baby! To the clubs to the parties to wherever there's alcohol and good times to be had, all across the nation we're getting down to neoclassical darkwave as this week, our album is Within the Realm of a Dying Sun by Dead CanDance! This album was selected by @fanaticalmilk, and you can listen with the links below:

Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/album/4WGpRBfDu7OJ4Rimkzu9jp

Apple Music:https://music.apple.com/us/album/within-the-realm-of-a-dying-sun-remastered/277713481

Youtube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kOSn7NV4fEckFaAl9A76iCZks2-n-Ljb0&si=tgpf_r06OxM_vD6F

Here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we gathered in a Discord, we made a pool of albums, and we chose one at random every week to listen to and discuss! If you want in, come on down!

I found myself in a weird place with this one.

On one hand, there's a lot about this album that I really loved, mainly that it finds an almost perfect balance between going hard (at least in the context of a post hardcore album) and being accessible. In fact, you could compare it to a lot of pop punk albums, but I think it has a lot more grit than that. I also think the singer has a really effective voice for the kind of music they make and their lyrics are fascinating. Sometimes they border on cringe, but rarely do they ever cross it. They're cryptic, but they frequently get something evocative and strange (in a good way).

On the other hand, I also felt at arm's length. I'll get my petty thing out of the way first, I don't like how the vocals are frequently layered below the guitars. Again, I think the singer has a good voice for the kind of emotionality they're trying to sell, and I do think he's trying to sell it, but it's frequently overwhelmed by the guitars. Which, hey, there's some great guitar shit here. It's just that, to me, the guitars and the vocals sound like they're in conflict with one another over my attention.

Moreover, I think they struggle with really getting to the emotional core with their songs, mainly in how they structure them. I'm talking out of my musical depth here, but it's like they set up a song to hit a certain emotional punch, but rather than seeing that through, they just jump into a new music idea. A new riff or a new time signature or something like that. I was really enjoying a lot of the songs but I can't say any of them felt fulfilling.

And yet, I've come back to a few of the songs every now and then, so there's something there. This might be one of those cases where I like an earlier or later album of their's better. But for me, it's definitely a case of an album I think is very good in a lot of ways, but I'm still disappointed because it's not quite great and they clearly have the capacity to get there.

Also I judged the shit out of this album going into it because I think Crime in Stereo's kind of a cringy name, but as a fan of groups with waaaaaaaaaay worse names, I know how to let that slide eventually.

Favorite Songs: "Third Atlantic" "Vicious Teeth" "Choker"

Duders! Welcome to the 43rd edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! For a while, we've been dormant, wading through the rigmarole of getting our shit together and building a new pool. But our shit has been secured and now we have the biggest pool we've had in quite some time! This cycle, we begin with Crime in Stereo is Dead by Crime in Stereo! This album was selected by @galaxiid and you can listen with the links below:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4yUbZUOpxSuioch7G122pP?si=1OVQjdlMSN2XKKCBSqSPzw&nd=1&dlsi=08ce3154c3f944b2

Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/crime-in-stereo-is-dead/1437186073

Bandcamp: https://bridge9.bandcamp.com/album/crime-in-stereo-is-dead

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lEmTwJC3-Sedcg89enBscMrRyTEkHhiPo

Here at the Unofficial GB Album Club, we gather in a Discord and make a pool of albums. We then pick one of said albums every week to listen to and discuss. We're full up on submissions at the moment, but if you want to come chill out and eventually get in on the next cycle (though that'll be a while), come on down!