The Lounge: McRib Jacuzzis and D!#% Hygene

Who is this we? Lol I live in mass our education system is regularly ranked top 10 in the world lol

I went to Mass schools.

They are trash.

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I listened to the new Tool album last night, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Adam Jones is a mastermind of musical complexity. After listening, I made the mistake of reading some reviews and I see a lot of mixed feelings from some journalists. ā€œMeh, there’s no songs like Stinkfist or Sober on it.ā€ And ā€œWe waited 13 years for this? Ugh.ā€

This is adult Tool. I was competently mesmerized from start to finish, and there’s so much there it’s going to take many times listening through to dissect it all. It’s like an Aesop Rock album- so complex that every time hearing it another piece of the puzzle falls into place. Some of the standouts for me are the title track Fear Inoculum, Invincible, Descent, and 7empest might be their best work ever- the culmination of their musical journey.

Most of the Tool fans are impressed and beyond happy, but these ā€œjournalistsā€ looking for the next radio hook won’t find that here. This is the evolution of an extremely talented band who takes it to the next level. It’s fucking amazing.

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Let me stop you right there: a lot of music journalists are not musicians. They’re the OG wack video game journalists.

I mean seriously, tool puts out albums. They have songs you can listen to as singles but it’s like a Pink Floyd ā€œsingleā€. Mofos should just keep shit to themselves.

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K. Stats don’t lie.

Straight pride parade is apparently today and I just learned they are protected under the first amendment.

You saying the journalists should keep shit to themselves?

Music journalists are just random people with opinions. the amount of them that are actual musicians are hella small.

I could probably google up bad reviews on some of my favorite bands and fine some hilariously bad ones from ā€œmusic journalistsā€. Them writing about stuff the band is doing: fine. Them acting as music critics? Lol no. Just listen to the music and see how it goes.

Besides, there are albums that take some time to really process. there’s albums that i’ve sort of hated on the first listen, then ended up absolutely loving. Music is a lot like Books: they age with you.

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Yea and I watched my dyslexic brother get completely fucking ignored by the mass school system no matter the help we tries to get him. Took the entire year for them to give him his books on tape so he could at least do the book reports.

Don’t fucking care about your stats. Sprry. Mass was one of the absolute worst achool districts i ever had to deal with. So bad my brother moved back to AZ for their statistically worse school system, got the help he needed and graduated. I went to 3 different high schools and I wouldn’t wish the trouble we had with mass schools on anyone.

Sorry.

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Ah, yeah I totally agree with that.

And music is such a subjective thing too, the way different people emotionally respond to it. More so than movies or games, in my opinion.

But yeah, new Tool is sick as fuck :metal:

Just realized the main character in Banshee plays Homelander in The Boys. Damn im slow, took me almost the entire 1st episode to figure it out :joy:

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Well…its more of an issue of people not being able to separate ā€œThis is goodā€ from ā€œI like itā€.

That’s why I stopped talking about movies in terms of good or bad. I judge all the movies I watched based entirely on how entertaining they were to me. My movie watching experience is way different because I go in with way different expectations. People can cry about how MCU movies are good or bad and yadda yadda yadda, Endgame was awesome because we saw Hulk take selfies and eat breakfast and Captain America held Mjonilr. 10/10 fucking movie.

But its also really hard to talk about things impersonally. Doing that is basically something you have to force yourself into learning how to do because it requires that you’d be able to admit when you have a bias. For example, I’ve been moving towards listening to a lot of comedy specials from Netflix lately. Last one I heard in full was Anthony Jeselnik’s Fire in the Maternity Ward. the whole thing is a lot of dark humor paired with a lot of dead pan. I a lot of it was really funny, but I didn’t necessarily like it. Then it became about thinking about the material, premises, punchlines etch and just going through why his style didn’t work for him. Most people would’ve just gone ā€œhe sux lolā€.

There’s certain mediums where the people that should be doing actual critic, where they are discussing the qualities of a work, are turbo terrible. B O Y

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As someone who had to go through special needs programs for various learning disabilities in the public school I had a better time.
I’m sorry his experience suffered, i just didn’t have that experience.

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one of the worst mistakes ever made by a music critic/site was giving I Get Wet by Andrew WK a low score, only to end up holding a L and having the 2012 reissue get high marks by that same site.

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I notice with critics, there a mark difference between a critic who just have the barest amounts of journalistic ā€œtrainingā€ and someone who at least, studdied, or dabbled if not was active in the field they are writing about. You see it in Food, Music, Alcohol, Film and art.

Imma have to check this out. I was a huge fan of Tool in high school but haven’t really listened to them since Lateralus so I’ll be interested to hear the new record.

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keep in mind as well that the streaming version of the new Tool has a different track layout versus the physical versions.

I used to write for a music magazine and this is true.

Most writers are just that, writers. It’s why you see people analyzing lyrics and not harmonic motion, melody composition, etc because most music reviewers don’t know anything about that.

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Does it? I hate it when they do stuff like that :rage: