ALBUMMER! 38: Imagine Dragons' Origins

cripes, this was a choice - sorry for your losses

audio download is not working for me

Natural and Real Life off this album are fantastic songs idc

Everything Now really was a bad album. I tried really hard to convince myself I liked it since I had loved Funeral so much, but that really was the demarcation point between Arcade Fire being THE band that mattered to me to A band that I would check out if I heard good things.

Edit: Mixed up Reflektor, which is merely okay, and Everything Now, which is real bad.

The League of Legends show Arcane made listen to an Imagine Dragons song for its open and made me go, "Oh, this is alright." and I'll never forgive them. Riot Games. The Arcane showrunners. Imagine Dragons. You.

This album sounds like it was written by committee in Sharpie on a whiteboard. Not a single idea sounds shot down in pre-production. Single flourish of strings at the end of a song before they're never heard from again? Check. Trap drums on a single verse of an album track? Keep it. I'm amazed an album could sound like absolutely nothing AND too busy at the same time.

That said, I liked this album more than the Fall Out Boy one they mentioned.

EDIT: I would absolutely buy jeans on the sole basis of Tom Waits yelling "GOTTA SLAP THAT HOG" in its commercial.

Whenever I hear imagine dragons it’s the biggest sounding music with the least amount of substance I’ve ever heard.

I bought someone an Imagine Dragons record a few years ago as a gift. I'm not sure they listen to music at all anymore.

My sister loves Imagine Dragons.

She also loves Ron DeSantis.

My nine year old nephew loves Imagine Dragons and I can’t wait to give him shit about it when he gets older.

I'm leaving this here for no reason.

As I listened, I thought surely they are exaggerating. That one song they played during a game awards show years sounded all right. How bad could they be?

After pausing and finding the album on youtube... No, they were not exaggerating.

Shout out Lingua Ignota!

I really like the point about the pace of music changing in the not too distant past. Hip-hop is another perfect example. The different between 1988 and 1998 is gargantuan and it boggles the mind how many parallel styles and sounds were going on, whole paradigm shifts in taste and appeal changing in just 5 years and often less.

The exercise of pick a random decade span and compare the two points in music really illustrates a lot.

And thank you for introducing me to the phrase "woop clap music." That will come in handy some day I'm sure of it.

Audio download still not working

I keep meaning to make a mashup of WAP and Backxwash's "Burn to Ashes" and then forgetting to do it - I kinda feel like anyone who has the capability has one of those ideas kicking around.

also thanks for submitting yourselves to a special kind of hell this week

Also it's not on Spotify? Straight up can't listen to this without watching the video I guess.

Still nothing on the Albummer podcast feed

The definition of imagine dragons is milquetoast

I absolutely love the point about how quickly music can evolve. My favorite example of this kinda thing is, as you pointed out, the first Ramones album was 1976, the first Crass album was 1978. Two years after Punk was arguably becoming established there was already this band that was saying "no this music can do more than just be angry and flippant" and declaring Punk dead, co-opted by materialism and capitalist forces before the starters pistol was even really shot. Granted that is more about a philosophy vs the sound but its still a fun thing to think about.

Still nothing on the podcast feed.

It's pretty funny how often different hardcore acts come up on these shows. Converge, Pig Destroyer. I've tried out every band y'all mention and it's always a fucking ride that's for sure.

There are so many hilarious tangents on this episode. The fly like a bird bit, the I wanna cum, so funny.