Waffle

Album Rating: 4.5

@ASIB - All fair points, and I do agree that this doesn't have the up-front accessibility of something like The Glow Pt. 2, but in some ways I appreciate the esoteric approach.

@zak when you listenin' to this bad boy?

Album Rating: 4.0

This whole thread is a beautiful episode of it's not that deep

Might bump though, this works p well for what it is

but then johnny wouldn't be able to comment at all

Album Rating: 4.0

don't you have taylor swift lyrics to be cursively analysing for frontpage benefit?

@toe

I gave it about 40 seconds and found I wasn’t in the mood.

Im Wald and i think this is overrated

Album Rating: 4.0

lots of shirts off in the yard itt

Album Rating: 4.0

since we're talking about [going on] the record, i don't mean 'for what it is' in a reductive or dismissive way; i think the reason the album 'works' is because of a) its earnestness, b) the level of detail it goes into and c) the level of studio mastery (which not nearly enough people have been talking about).

the record works on its own terms, with its own personal voice, and its strengths are drawn from this rather than because it articulates anything universally meaningful (which i think phil's lyrical voice actively shies away from), unless you count the phenomena of getting older, [not] changing in certain ways, and being able to reminisce as inherently meaningful (in which case i'd say we're comfortably in the ballpark of not that deep). i don't think it's inherently deep to describe time as a waterfall, among other things, but that metaphor works for the album/lyrics precisely because it's so simple to grasp.

i think a lot of people have been confusing its strength as a personal statement with whatever their conceptions of what high concept art, or whatever, is supposed to be (to which end inflating this as a superdeep statement is actually quite unhelpful), but that comes down to medium specificity and formalism more than anything else: this requiring a non-cynical headspace on account of its candour, the title being arbitrary because the record isn't geared towards a sense of resolved, packageable completion, and this coming out under an old project name because the memories involved are directly associated with it +the supposed illusion of having grown up from it are all things i'd consider not that deep, but still significant

tl;dr the act of memory, in whatever level of detail, is not that deep. you do it all the time, even if you don't bother to mine it as richly as phil does, but that doesn't detract from the way he expresses himself here

Album Rating: 4.0

gonna bump this up now and return to my lie-in, see y'all

Album Rating: 4.5

damn zak doing me dirty.

if you're that impertinent you can skip to around the seven-minute mark and try going from there. (the first seven minutes are literally those same chords over and over with minimal to no variation.)

No need to undermine earnest art to make a flippant comment based on otherwise valid opinions about the album's quality.


but then johnny wouldn't be able to comment at all

also this is objectively deep

Album Rating: 5.0

I've returned to see if any other users have contributed something productive to the conversation since this morning. Glad to see Johnny has weighed in. Completely respect that perspective m8, we simply have different attitudes about what is profound and meaningful. It's not as though I think Phil has penned some revolutionary novel concept but few are able to stabilize the balance of ideas and the emotional delivery of them in complimentary ways. I would not be rating this a 5 without the accompanying photo essay but that just speaks to strength of the forms catalystic ability to connect with the bare soul and vulnerabilities of another in ways that are becoming ever rarer in the material world let alone the realm of art built on the bones of those who have tried in vain.



To me, the themes of time, memory and identity are some of the most universally relatable and present in many great works of art (Resnais, Wong Kar-Wai, Proust, Heidegger etc.) and even entire religions like Daoism, or Buddhism's concept of time and self as an illusory ever flowing river - that's straight from Siddartha. It is undeniably so that my opinion of the work is a syncretic fusion of it and all that I am for how else could it be? So then is yours and I cannot fault what that personal alchemy results in.



Meme this as pasta all you want, I was here when the original Opeth pasta was born (or was it Darkthrone? so long ago). As reflexively cringey as it may be, I will take earnest attempts at creation over hollow cynicism.



Also, thanks for the Stereolab discog write-up, quite enjoyed that.

tbf virtually everyone in this thread was here when "the original opeth pasta" was born



johnny i'd also like to know what your idea of ~depth~ is, because from what you've said it sounds like you conflate being 'deep' with being 'profound' and i don't agree with that parallel.

Album Rating: 4.5

damn i didn't see any photo album essay shit and i still give this a 4.5.

what would it be betrothed to a scrapbook of heavily sentimental and personalized visual signposts? 5.5? 6.0?!

The photo/lyric vid did elevate the experience for me too

Album Rating: 5.0

Sort of impossible to say at this point but I reckon a strong 4.0/5

You really should check it out if you ever revisit this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7BkabF31ak

Album Rating: 4.0

@plane&Pots I consider deep is a semi-colloquial shorthand for describing things that carry a range of significances on a variety of levels, whereas profound indicates a level of usually self-evident insight and thoughtfulness behind its creation that gives it a feeling of richness but doesn't necessarily change its overall potential significance. I guess the distinction I make between the two is similar to the distinction between 'meaningful' and 'thoughtful', though maybe I'm underselling profound because I don't use it or encounter it that often (a shame tbh, gonna look out for it more). Anyway, I don't think 'deep' applies here because the song/album's significance is so clearly and primarily personal (although you could say it invites the listener to project their own experiences of memory and change onto it, I guess), but I'd definitely consider it profound.

"Something can be simple and simply understood and still be "that deep," surely?"

I think so, but I'd question whether this record's subject matter is that deep to begin with, or that it needs to be! Unexpectedly, your other question made me realise that there's very little music I'd call 'deep' in general. I with music things tend to be meaningful in the way they're intuitively processed and understood in abstract or emotional terms, and most artists pitch for this rather than trying to weave different layers of meaning into their lyrics...maybe - this isn't something I've thought about in detail before. Here's a couple of examples of tracks I'd consider deep off the top of my head - both up for debate ofc, and I'm inevitably overlooking a lot:

> Modest Mouse - Styrofoam Boots (because the brilliant detail of the personal mannerisms makes its subject matter as applicable to an everyday church environment as to the broader sense of its theological satire, while drawing a line between spiritual and business manners).

> David Bowie - Rock 'n' Roll Suicide (purely for the you're not alone lyric breaking the fourth wall of the fiction the rest of the album sustains while implying that rock has just been a escapist process for listener and artist alike all the while, or that the rest of Bowie's performance as Ziggy Stardust is somehow inadequate without the explicit utterance of those words - but maybe I'm reading into this one)

to me, “deep, deep” is a pretty good unrelated tune 🧐