Sometimes, you just need to add something OTHER than music reviews to your blog. Some think pieces, some lists, something or other to keep things from getting stale. I wanted to make my first musical think piece, and it's a topic I've wanted to talk about for quite some time now: albums that have either grown on me or grown away from me.
For this list, I will primarily be focusing on albums that I reviewed in 2017. 2018 has just started, and a lot of these new albums haven't had nearly enough time to settle with me and talk their talk beyond one listen. All of the records on this list are records I talked about during 2017, and all of them are albums I have slightly different opinions on than before. This doesn't necessarily mean I would change my ratings for them or anything, it just means that I've either come to appreciate them a bit more or maybe I just haven't dug them as much as I did during my first listen. Let's look at them and discuss.
Oh, and each record will be pictured below, but I apologize if the scale happens to be inconsistent on them. I couldn't find all ten of them at the same resolution, so I just had to make do with what I had. Either way, let's get into these albums (and mixtapes, in some cases).
LIL UZI VERT - LUV IS RAGE 2 (GROWN ON)
Sure, prolific SoundCloud rapper Lil Uzi Vert's debut album is a wildly inconsistent mess, filled with some of his highest highs, and his lowest lows, and for every "Dark Queen" or "The Way Life Goes" on the record, there's a "444+222" or a "Pretty Mami." However, I've pretty much consistently come back to all of the tracks on this album that I listed under the "favorites" in my review (some have even grown to become favorites with multiple listens), and I'll point out that I listed 8 of the 16 songs as my "favorites" on the album. While this record may be a bit bloated and inconsistent, if you can get me to regularly come back to and enjoy half of it, you're at least doing something right. Kudos, Uzi.
THE WEEKND - HOUSE OF BALLOONS (GROWN ON)
You can actually apply this to the "Trilogy" as a whole, but I specifically want to zero in on "House of Balloons" because, as you guys may know, I rated this the lowest out of the three original mixtapes. And while I still honestly stand by that, I have to give it credit for having two of my all-time favorite Weeknd songs, "House of Balloons / Glass Table Girls" and "The Party & The After Party." Repeat listens to the later mixtapes also yielded some new favorite songs as well, such as "Life of the Party," "Next," and "Till Dawn (Here Comes The Sun)." Sure, I feel like I'll have to go back and listen to some of the other songs on this thing to see if it REALLY grew on me, but I have to give it credit for giving me two of my personal favorites from him.
RAE SREMMURD - SREMMLIFE 2 (GROWN ON)
I know, I gave this one a good review when I first looked at it, but here's the thing: while I enjoyed both of Rae Sremmurd's albums, I at first wasn't too sure whether or not I enjoyed this more or less than the first "SremmLife." This one still felt a bit too inconsistent to me, and the album really starts to slow up at the end with songs like "Came A Long Way," "Take It Or Leave It," "Do Yoga," and "Over Here." However, repeat listens to a lot of these tracks have helped me to enjoy this thing even more than the first. It's a nonstop party, it's extremely fun and, while the album does still slow to a crawl near the end, I can't deny it's a really fun record that shows some maturity out of the boys. It's another one of those albums where I never hit the skip button on any of the tracks I listed as "favorites," which not even some of my "excellent" albums can do, so Rae Sremmurd deserves some credit there. Now, if only they'd release SremmLife 3 already...
MACKLEMORE - GEMINI (GROWN AWAY)
This is gonna be a rare case on this list where an album I already didn't enjoy grew even further away from me. When I first heard this album, I felt like the only real fun I had with it was with the songs that didn't sound like typical, formulaic Macklemore affairs. In fact, you know I had a rough time with the album when I had blanked pretty much everything I had just heard from it out of my head immediately after writing the review. However, I didn't give it an "awful" because, at the time, I felt like there were at least a few solid tracks that would be worth coming back to. Given that I haven't even tried to come back to them since then, and haven't really cared for them when I did come back...yeahhhhhh...
MILEY CYRUS - YOUNGER NOW (GROWN AWAY)
You ever listen to an album and not exactly comprehend why you liked it? Something about it just felt right? That was me with the latest Miley Cyrus album, "Younger Now." Going into the album, I didn't really care much for country music, nor did I care much for Miley's music. Yet, this record happened to strike a chord with me when I listened to it. I'm not sure what it was, but I ended up enjoying it quite a bit more than I thought. However, since listening to it for my review, I can't really say I've gone back to it much, nor have I had the motivation to return to it. And it's not a case of "I'm not going back because I don't like it," because hearing it again, I do still think it's good, but I guess it's just that I like it in the context of the artist and the genre, and just don't really find it all that exciting as a comfort listen.
SHANIA TWAIN - NOW (GROWN AWAY)
Here's another example of an album I already didn't like that I've grown even farther away from. This was one of my personal biggest disappointments in the art world in 2017 because I love Shania and I still listen to her old music. However, as I mentioned in my review, it felt like Shania, on this album, wasn't sure whether to modernize her sound or stick to what made her big, and the album just comes off to me as very bland, robotic, and formulaic. But again, I didn't give it an "awful" rating at the time. And each time I tried to go back to it, I found myself disliking it more and more, and I have to say, I think I should've given it an "awful," all things considered.
NIALL HORAN - FLICKER (GROWN ON)
Another example where an album grew on me even after I wrote my review. The thing is after my first listen, and after I posted said review, I had a gut feeling I wouldn't come back to this thing much, and that as light and nice as it was, it wasn't gonna have the lasting appeal that, say, an Ed Sheeran record has had on me. However, this is another one of those albums where all of the songs I have listed under my "favorites" have become unskippable to me. There's just a certain charm and beauty to Niall's songs that help him stand tall among the many artists comparable to Ed Sheeran.
KANYE WEST - THE LIFE OF PABLO (GROWN ON)
Another album where you pretty much won't find me skipping out on any of the songs I have listed as "favorites," I actually remember that this album made me tired after my first listen. Maybe it's because I tried to take extensive notes, maybe it was overly long, maybe it was the time of the day, I have no idea, but either way, I felt extremely tired after listening to it, and part of me believed that would impact whether or not I regularly came back to this thing. It didn't, and while it's an album I joke about (how does Kanye go from singing about a God dream to wishing his penis had GoPro so he could rewatch his sex in slow motion?), it's an album I still enjoy listening to and come back to on the regular.
FOO FIGHTERS - CONCRETE AND GOLD (GROWN AWAY)
I think I established in my review of this album that I should keep my nose out of the rock music scene and just stick to the pop, hip-hop, and R&B stuff I usually review. However, in my younger years that were spent playing "Guitar Hero," I loved me some Foo Fighters, so surely a new album could get me back into the group's stuff, right? Well, no. It's not that it was bad to me, I just couldn't really get into it. And this isn't a case where repeat listens caused me to see issues in the music, it's a case where I haven't felt motivated to give it those repeat listens. This is actually one of those cases where I wish I had either given it an "it's not for me" rating, or just no rating at all.
U2 - SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (GROWN AWAY)
If there's one album review I've written where people will look at and say that I "overpraised," it's probably this one. Most of the reviews on this thing were pretty average, and a lot of people just didn't really care for it. Maybe it's because of it just sounding like everything they've done before? I don't know, but for some strange reason, I found myself enjoying it when I first listened to it. And even then, oddly enough, upon my return to some of the songs on the album, I still found myself having a pretty good time! The main reason I say "grow away" though is because those times where I return to it are few and far between. I feel like, of all the albums I've given high ratings to, this is the one that had the least lasting appeal to me. I still acknowledge that I did like it, and still do, but I just don't feel any urgency to come back to it at this point.
So, there you have it, ten albums I’ve either grown to appreciate more or haven’t enjoyed nearly as much as when I reviewed them. Oddly enough, I listed five albums that have grown on me and five that have grown away from me. Funny, huh? Either way, what are some albums that have either grown on or away from you? Leave yours down below in the comments!
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