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Old 02-25-2019, 07:19 PM
dubman
BigColor&Excited4SoupMan
 
Join Date: Dec 2008
Posts: 2,569
Re: Drift Ep. 2...wishes and predictions
I have two hearts for OWB. there's a clarity and refinement that i can appreciate, but that same refinement is what makes it sound tepid and estranged. as a statement on its own it's worth exploring, and when compared to AHDO it had definitely achieved a more distilled level of that sound, but the raw energy is gone. I talked earlier about how a band's sound can have an essential vitality that feels like a blueprint for the future; the strange places it could grow from and the life that gives its listener. I always think of the Pearl's Girl EP when I think about this. That it pursued and executed this convalescent polish out of these many branches was a kind of death i didn't quite register at the time, and was finally nailed into my head with Barking and the collabs with High Contrast. They had "arrived", and it didn't work for me at all.
of course i tried to be optimistic about it all. you can't repeat the past and it wasn't a bad album, and there were definite threads from the past to weave together here. but aging it finally laid out what it really meant to me, and i don't revisit it very often.