it's a lame book.

just listening to this for the first time atm. if i thought bath was kind of mediocre (there are some fantastic songs and a lot of mediocre ones. mostly i find it really inconsistent and too all over the place) is this worth investing an hour?

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

Eh I liked it.



I say spin it at least once for sure. It's very clearly related to bath (they're essentially one album), but it also offers a lot of different stuff. I think that it's pretty much inferior in every way (if only slightly), but in terms of song-to-song quality I would say this album is more consistent, largely due to the Interlude tracks being way better and the flow from track to track being less stark.

so far i'm at least enjoying it. i actually enjoyed both the softer and heavier tracks from bath, but not all of them. i thought that intro song whose name i can't remember (they're not all beautiful i think?) was pretty great, and then of course geography and a few others. just felt like it went on forever though and had a lot of meandering.

on the second song now. don't have much of an opinion right now, but the first song was interesting. i actually liked the last like minute-thirty the most. that guitar melody was lovely. and the weird guitar chord that kept interrupting it - seems like something maudlin do that is sometimes off putting to me, but i liked that. pretty surreal-sounding track.

i really like the atmosphere on this after 4 tracks. thought the second track was 'nice' but not super compelling, but the third one picked it back up again. loved the bells in the background. idk, i feel like i'd love kayo dot and maudlin a whole lot more if i actually took the time to sit down and force myself to listen to their entire discogs a couple times over but it's so daunting

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

First song is The Blue Ghost/Shedding Qliphoth and it's like top 5 opening tracks ever. They Aren't All Beautiful is the second, heavier track.

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

It's daunting yeah but it's worth it. I could never do it for more than a few hours though. I sat through all four of maudlin's albums once and that was a pretty taxing experience. Not because it was bad but because it's really engaging.



Kayo Dot's discography is extremely challenging though. After like a year of stirring it every now and then Coyote finally sounded like a great album to me. Dowsing didn't actually take me long to get into but some people say it's their most difficult.



Obviously you aren't going to end up forcing yourself to like anything but whenever people listen to and don't love bath I feel like they're missing out on a pretty dope part of life.

bath has some incredible moments, just always seemed so much longer to me than it is for some reason. going to go back to it and listen again. i barely even remember the opening track you mentioned.

i'm weird when it comes to kayo dot. i got into choirs almost immediately, and for some time i thought marathon was one of their best songs, which i found out is one of their least popular on here (i still hold that it's incredible and one of their best). coyote is criminally underrated but definitely not easy to get into. hubardo is hard to get into too though. songs like floodgate are out of this world, but it pains me to sit through the black stone, which is an impenetrable wall of monotony

tbh i think any band is hard to stomach when you're just going from one album to the next. no matter how good it is, it's hard to listen to music for over two hours. even one hour is draining sometimes

hahah funny how we were just talking about catcher in the rye and you start spouting out stream of consciousness in the same vein

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

I've never actually listened to a song from bath without it being a part of me listening to the whole album, and usually when I'm done with bath I get this weirdly powerful urge to listen to more maudlin. Like, to the point where nothing else I listen to even moderately entertains me. So I actually end up listening to at least 2ish hours of maudlin whenever I listen to them.



bath always felt like the perfect "sit down and listen" album for me. There's so much to dissect and experience, and it just floors me every single time. Marathon is a magnificent song but it's stacked against some of Kayo Dot's best songs ever on the same album so its lack of popularity is kind of understandable.

piglet: haha touche

ending: yeah that's fair. maybe it's because it was the first kayo dot song i heard. got those nostalgia glasses on.

so far i'm really liking this album. like, a lot more than i thought i would. so many sombre moments, and such intensity in others. overall it has that all-over-the-place tendency i criticized but i'm enjoying it a lot here. always fresh, always engaging. i especially liked interlude 3. what a gorgeous melody

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

I can never listen to them in the wrong mood. I need to be engaged every time I listen otherwise I feel like I space out for a moment and miss something. For some reason that idea doesn't bother me with literally any album other than bath but if I'm disengaged for even a second on that album I feel like my listen with it is ruined. I guess I'm weird in that way.



Psychobells kicks ass honestly. Blight of River Systems is one of my favourite songs ever. I think it has a really charming sense of adolescence to it - you can definitely tell that they didn't quite have their bearings in full for that album.



And yeah Gyro both Interludes on this kick ass. On bath they're kind of forgettable but on this one they're just fantastic. It could be partly nostalgia but I've probably heard Choirs hundreds of times and I think it's just a case of a 5.0/5.0 song being stacked against some 10.0/5.0 jams.

psychobells is their debut? i'll have to check that out too then. i'm actually pretty excited to listen to their last album. it seemed to be pretty well-received by many. i'm going to head back on over to bath when this is over and see if my opinion has changed at all. maybe i just wasn't in the mood for it when i heard it. i'll say this though: i could listen to an entire album of songs like interlude #3 (and i do remember the interludes on bath being weak spots). driver clearly has the mind to create some of the most lovely arrangements ever when he wants.

it's actually so weird how much imagery this album evokes. i haven't spent enough time with it yet to decide how much i like it, but what a trip it's been listening to it. interlude 4 with the bells makes me think of christmas, while some of the other songs have lovely melodies that make me think of a tropical setting, and then that one song whose bells reminded me of being in this one very old church. so many different moods to this

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

Yeah he just has to draw it from his special transcendental art world or enter his dream universe to do it. Whatever that means.



PsychoBells is their debut LP yeah. It has a really lo-fi sound compared to their other albums but honestly I think it fits the songs extremely well. A lot of people would call me a blind fanboy for saying that but it gives it a bit more of a raw tone that is absent from pretty much anything else they've ever done.



Part The Second is just a must listen. I made my parents listen to it back in the day haha. So good, some of the most engaging and accessible songwriting Toby has done in my opinion.



bath's Interlude tracks are in a weird spot for me. I agree that they're the unquestionable weak spots of the album, but I remember trying to listen to the album without them once and it just didn't work at all. I think of them more as actual interludes rather than songs now, which Ov will probably chew me out for but I like it better that way. It's like a loading screen that you listen to for the next song and both of them are placed perfectly.

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

Interlude IV is a legend yeah got that Santa Claus vibe.

yeah i was thinking the same. i probably need to hear them in the context of the album to really appreciate them.

i like the accessible side of toby. like, even when the music is accessible it's still 'challenging' (pitcher of summer comes to mind).

just finishing this now. surprised how quickly an hour went in. legit was not expecting to love that as much as i did but damn. on any given track there's so much happening, and it has such a wide range of emotions. i'll come back to it again to get a better feel for it but based on the first listen i think it's fantastic

Album Rating: 4.0

fuck sake i still havent listened to this properly yet other than the opener a bunch of times and gleam in ranks is one of my fav songs off all time

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

Definitely. On their own Interlude I and Interlude II are pretty weak yeah but they are integral to the flow of the album. Even moreso with Interlude III and IV except both of those songs actually rule.



I agree but I think he's at his best when he just does his own weird thing. I always wonder what it'd be like for him to collaborate with another composer of similar ambition because I feel like no matter how much variety he can cook up it follows some of his compositional tendencies.



Yeah this album is pretty much 9.0/5.0. Gleam In Ranks, Sleep Is a Curse, Monstrously Low Tide, Bizarre Flowers, and Curve are all insanely good. Interlude IV will probably be engraved into my memory forever.

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

What the hell. Listen to it right now you scrub.