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Don Dio wrote:I listened to the new album quite a few times now, and like so many others have stated, I am surprised how much I enjoy it.
I'm super late to this party but part of that is because it's just taken me this long to even get used to this album.
I'm surprised by it, but I'm still not really sure in what way. I do know that I like some of the songs on it - a few I like a LOT - and the band has been more or less going in this direction since leaving Sony, so it's not like I'm surprised by that, specifically. Nor am I really surprised by my reaction to it, and the ambivalence I have about it.
I read Jade's translation of the Rolling Stone interview (thanks for that!) and I get where they're coming from, but I feel like it's an over-correction. They were expected to be something when they were younger and now that they're older and more autonomous, they're almost rebelling against that. Many bands go through this phase; most of those that stick around eventually come back to what they originally were, whether through a realization that their early stuff was actually pretty good and is just as much a part of who they are as anything else, or just through wanting to please the fans.
I also realize that this album was made during a weird time and making a "fun" album might have been too much to ask. I think that might be my biggest surprise and biggest issue with the album - it's just not fun. It's kind of dour. And I like a lot of music that fits that description, but it's just not really what I look to Scandal for and I don't know that it suits them. That said, I get that it's a reflection of how they're feeling and they're just being real. But maybe how they're feeling just didn't make for the best album this time out. There's nothing really rocking on the album (well, nothing *new* anyway), and none of their trademark goofiness either. The best song on the album is Spice, which is a bonus track released standalone a long time ago now, before they really mellowed out.
I do also really, really like Yugure, Tokeru and have been listening to it on repeat for the past several days. I guess it says *something* that, without having read anything about this album (or the liner notes), when I heard it I thought "this must be a Haruna song" and I was right. There is something about her songs that have their own sound, or their own melody and chord structure, which I don't feel is *as* true of the other members. Unless they're actually singing, for example, I can't tell what separates a Mami song from a Tomomi song from half the writers they used to use. But I can always tell a Haruna song.
Still, I wouldn't want a full Scandal album of Haruna songs, because again, they're usually pretty serious, polished, and mature songs. They're good for a change of pace. (I wouldn't mind a Haruna solo album, I guess, where I would *expect* everything to sound pretty much like her.) There's not enough to balance out Yugure, Tokeru on this album; the other songs are pretty much all also serious, just in different ways.
I agree about Ivory. It's never been my favorite.
What you wrote here is definitely how I feel:
Don Dio wrote:the only reason I will listen to this album is because it's by Scandal.
If someone gave me an album with this music on it from a band I'd never heard of, I doubt I'd have given it a second listen. But then the few songs I do like would never have had the chance to grow on me.
Lastly, I'm sure I sound like an absolute broken record (no pun intended) about this, but this is another album from them that doesn't *sound* great, at least the CD. It's not as bad as Honey in that way but it's bad. It's boomy and brickwalled often to the point of distortion. I've looked at it in Audacity and I'm listening to lossless FLACs through a high-res player (with a good DAC) into studio monitor headphones. It sounds bad. Definitely worse than KFTD, which was a big improvement over Honey in sound quality. To even listen to it with good headphones I have to turn both the low and high end way down in the EQ, but that doesn't fix the distortion from clipping. They really need to stop mastering stuff this way. It's obvious it was recorded well, it's just the mastering. Maybe if there's a high-res version, it'll sound better. Some of their high-res releases do seem to have different masters.
