The Daily Spin, December 13
Catfish and the Bottlemen | The Balance
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: The Balance (2019)
Artist: Catfish and the Bottlemen
Link:
It’s hard to review a group’s third album when, for all intents and purposes, they haven’t exactly shifted their sound massively, so this one’s gonna be a little shorter than most other reviews.
It’s not like Catfish and the Bottlemen are getting massively worse with each album - the highs are very much still there, and the elation that grabs me when those tightly orchestrated riffs fall through to my ears is the same as it always has been, but too much of the album winds up feeling a little loose, a little less pristine.
With music like this, there’s appeal in authenticity, something that makes it all feel a little more real, but you have to be able to balance that between sounding authentic and sounding sloppy. I’m not someone who generally loves massives walls of sound bearing down on me, and I love it even less when it’s primarily treble-focused - it just gives me a headache, man.
The base product is good enough to escape most of the more severe critiques, but it’s an unfortunate point to be at here.
Rating: 8.4/10
Best Tracks: Encore; Longshot
Worst Tracks: Basically