everyone keeps making this "give me albums to review" threads

[t-rogdor]

Re: everyone keeps making this "give me albums to review" threads

Why? - Alopecia

it's good, i'm drunk

Favorite Songs- 1-5
Least Favorite Songs- Gnashville not a huge fan
Verdict- it's good and i'm going to buy a copy of the lp off discogs thanks
Average Score- good
Overall Score (With Bias)- like probably an 8
Notes- yoni is sad and so am i thanks

[hi19hi19]

Re: everyone keeps making this "give me albums to review" threads

That Adventures of Lulu review made me

A. spend about 5 minutes straight laughing before I could control myself again
B. check out the album out of morbid fascination

I completely agree with your assessment, 10/10 would equate to a walk through aural hell

[t-rogdor]

Re: everyone keeps making this "give me albums to review" threads

it's legitimately one of the worst fucking albums i've ever sat down and listened to, but something about it is just SO bad that I couldn't stop listening. It's like nothing I've ever heard, and nothing I hope to hear in the near future

[rayword45]

Re: everyone keeps making this "give me albums to review" threads

you should recommend albums to me

return the favor for the experience of lulu

[choof]

Re: everyone keeps making this "give me albums to review" threads

i would say that lulu review is the best thing ever but "riff raff with a little mouth" and the short story you wrote are better

but goddamn

[t-rogdor]

Re: everyone keeps making this "give me albums to review" threads

Langdon Alger- Following The Lizard Queen

The year is 1997, the month May, and the day the 18th. I've been alive for 830 days. This year, my parents, unable to find a babysitter, will take me to see the film Good Will Hunting. I will laugh at the movie when appropriate, and understand its meaning entirely. I will stand up during the "how you like them apples" scene and shout "I LIKE EM A LOT, JIMMY" at the screen. The audience will laugh. I will experience, for the first time, the endorphin rush of entertaining a crowd. In seven years I will be introduced to Mitch Hedberg, and begin the downward spiral into "comedy". But for now, none of that matters. For now, I am happy. I blow out the candles on my cake and laugh. Nothing taints this moment. I am happy. My mother and father are, seemingly, still in love. It will be many years before I think I feel "love" for another human being, and many more after that until I truly do. That first love will be rough, painful, and awkward. It will begin in infidelity, and end in infidelity. The time before it begins will be littered with desperation and emotional immaturity. The time after it has ended will be littered with desperation and a return to my smoking habit.

It will take the dissolution of my first true romance for me to ever be honest about my feelings. Through the rubble of what once was I will finally find the ability to be my own being; to not stifle my own voice in order to mirror the thoughts of those around me, for safety.

Similarly, Following The Lizard Queen, a project by Crywank offshoot Langdon Alger, begins with desperation and emotional immaturity and ends with a strange sense of clarity. The album, a concept of twice-mentioned Simpsons character "Langdon Alger", follows a child's first encounter with the concept of love. The difference here being that the titular Langdon will not have those feelings given back, and will spiral into insanity. He will stalk his love interest and her various love interests, masturbating to the former and plotting to kill the latter. He is a child unable to process his reality.

It is now 2000. I am five years old. My favorite artist is Beck. Though Beck has fallen off in recent releases, his early, more experimental anti-folk will influence me heavily. It is around this time that I will begin staying up late to watch Space Ghost: Coast To Coast, furthering my descent into meta-thought and comedy (read: self loathing). For now, I am still happy. I lack the brevity or wit to fully understand why I like what I do, but that's not important. What is important is that I know what I like.

Following The Lizard Queen is a jarring listen. The guitar playing is loose and, at times, discordant. The vocal performance is so raw it sounds like it was recorded during the emotional highs and lows of the aforementioned Langdon. They're off key, and rushed. They're raw. They reek of angry depression. Is it avant-garde? I cannot say. Is it pretentious? Possibly. But none of that matters. The album's key selling point is its emotional intensity. We're not talking Andrew Jackson Jihad type faux-emotional, either. If Beck's music was "anti-folk" (a borderline anarchic takedown of what folk music had become, mocking its feigned artistry and shallow emotional depth), then Crywank and Langdon Alger's music is "anti-folk punk". There is no dressing up of these awful, human emotions. There are no Wavves-esque presentations of emotional immaturity ("I HATE MY MOM AND DAD" "FUCK YOUR RELIGIONS, FUCK YOUR GOD" etc). This is someone laying their soul bare for us to consume until there is nothing left of us both.

As I entered the third track on this album, "Density", I was reminded of a shameful memory. As James Clayton croons "Watching your first embrace / I wait in the bush, and masturbate", I'm sent back in time yet again. I can't remember my age now. My memory has begun to fade, and the only way I can remember what age that my memories occur at is to do some bootleg math based around what grade I was in. It's 6th grade. This is the year that I first masturbate. While watching some show on G4 do a sketch about the Wii that involved a barely clothed woman jumping around, I felt weird. I would later download the video and put it on my Creative MP3 player. When I was alone in the house, I would lie under a blanket and rapidly shake my dick back and forth until I felt relief. Nothing came out. The next morning, my foreskin would be puffy and I'd be unable to pee in a solid stream. I would wear this as a personal shame for the next week.
The week after it goes away, I will do it again.
and again.
and again.
and again.
and again.

I write this review as someone who isn't a fan of the simpsons. I've seen the show a lot. When I went through my DXM phase, I would torrent old seasons and watch them. But I was never a fan. I used to watch King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead in my parents' apartment in Portland, Oregon. Those shows were what I enjoyed. But I've seen enough to get the majority of the references made in this album. The odd thing is that the references are obvious, but not funny. They border on being chilling. Especially as the album goes into its last half, as the music gets even more desperate, and the titular character spirals even further into madness. "thought I could mold myself into the man you dream of" is sung in a Tiny Tim-esque falsetto as Langdon laments his obsession, wondering how to get out of it. Even opening lines such as "Everything's coming up someone else" send me further into this exploration of self, as opposed to pulling me out of the immersion. As far as heavily referential concept albums go, Following The Lizard Queen finds a perfect home between "lack of references at all" and "so many references it ruins the album".

It's 2009. I've dropped out of school due to a case of mono. Over the next year I will fall in "love" yet again, tragically, and spend the better part of six months used as a toy for two people I once considered friends. I won't know this fact until years later. The next year I will find myself in love once more, this one more honest. The previous bouts have been just brushes with more emotionally immaturity based in sexual perversion. This love is pure. It will be the first where I'm given the love in return. It will be rough and awkward. Soon after, I will get a sloppy blowjob in a movie theater as the Ryan Renolds-starring The Green Lantern plays to a mostly empty theater. Soon after, I will discover that I am uncomfortable in my own body. I will not act on this until 3 years later. 3 years later, I will be left in the dust. Almost forgotten. I won't be able to act on my own actions until given a shock to my emotional system that finally kicks it into gear after it shut down due to my dad's emotional abuse. I will finally fucking grow up.

It sucks, to be in love, and the first true brush with it is the worst. Like one's first time smoking weed, no matter how it feels, good or bad, you'll always compare subsequent experiences to that first time. Nostalgia will prevent you from enjoying what's currently happening, or worse, make you overblow how much you like it. Nostalgia, a toxin, will prevent you from accepting reality. It will play your biases up to a comical level. Maybe that first time wasn't that great. Maybe you actually did hate it. Maybe you were hurt and were ok with it because you felt like you finally had a place. Maybe it wasn't bad. Maybe it was actually good. Maybe you're making it into something bad to make it easier to digest that it's over. Maybe you fucked it up, but you blame the other party as a defense mechanism. Maybe you just fucked up picking someone so perfect for your first relationship. Everyone wrecks their first car. That's why you get a used one.
You, the unfortunate sap, picked a Ferrari for your first car.
It hurt so much more when you wrecked it.

The year is 2014. The month, June, and the day, technically the 29th. The only reason I continue to wake up is my possible future creating the type of content that once entertained me as a child. I no longer get much enjoyment out of what I make. Rewatching what influenced me makes me begin to piece together who I am, and more importantly, why I am. The resulting nostalgia is too much. I'm full of the wrong kind of toxin. It makes me sick. I think back to an old band I used to love and decide, as a distraction, to see what they're up to. On their bandcamp I see an album titled Following The Lizard Queen. I go into it headfirst, without remembering how emotionally abrasive the artist is. It hits hard. I am taken on a trip through my own past. The music hurts me. It makes me look at myself through a lens I want to forget; the same lens that allows the memory of listening to Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" and masturbating to the concept someone who is a complete stranger to seep back into my conscious thought. But its horrific beauty keeps me listening.
I get in my car and buy a black and mild from the gas station around the corner.

The year is 2014, and I am no longer happy.
But that does not matter.
Because I can remember when I was.
And god dammit, it was good.
It was good as hell.

Favorite Songs- Density, What Went Down At Holding Hands Peak (pt. 2)
Least Favorite Songs- n/a
Average Score- 4.5/5
Overall Score (With Bias)- 10/10

[t-rogdor]

Re: everyone keeps making this "give me albums to review" threads

i'll go back to listening to things people actually told me to tomorrow.
i just had to uh
write all that down.