Braids – “Native Speaker”
Okay I’ve listened to it and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I don’t get what all the hype is about with Braids and their debut album Native Speaker. It’s good to point, but it’s trying to hard to be something it’s not, and that’s where it loses me.
I love it when a band gets lost in the process of creation, but listening to this, it feels like Braids calculated every move, and didn’t account for the most important one in the creative process – emotional reaction. It all feels too structured and over contrived for me to enjoy fully – it’s as if they were saying “next we have to do this and that, it’ll be so much cooler”, instead they should have let it happen a little more. Now that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy parts of it.
The subtleties of the album are great, the way they transition in a out of songs, the start of the album as a whole, brings you in with a curious wonderment, and the overall unique sounds used play together well, but as Gary says – go on WAY to long, like a bad SNL skit. We get it. Give us something different.
Braids is trying so hard on this album. What they are trying to do is where they lose me though. They’re a young band and will grow into something special; I still feel their best album is yet to come out of them.
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