The Daily Spin, July 21
alt-J | An Awesome Wave
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 song from each album right here.
Album: An Awesome Wave (2012)
Artist: alt-J
Link:
The last time I reviewed alt-J, speaking to their third record, RELAXER, I made mention of what I felt was unfair judgment bestowed upon the band in basically every capacity from all angles - Pitchfork panned these guys harder than just about every act I’ve seen, and have done so consistently.
An Awesome Wave, of their opening triad of albums, confuses me the most for having received that treatment. I hate to be the sort of guy who decries other people’s taste, but there’s a very real part of me that thinks, every time I look at critical reception to this album, that they got it wrong, badly wrong at that.
Each song feels deliberate, and while it doesn’t always strike cohesive, this is the rare case where it doesn’t feel like it has to be cohesive. There’s enough of a common thread from song to song, usually in the gently ambling guitars and the unique, falsetto-dominated vocal runs, the sort of music that floats steadily into your ears, warming you the whole way through.
I specifically want to call out the run from ‘Something Good’ through ‘Ms’, which is, in my opinion, one of the finest four-track runs on any album ever made - in sequence, four gorgeous depictions of emotion, all different, but all clearly alt-J. The way that ‘Dissolve Me’ incorporates a rapid drumbeat to differentiate from the slower pacing of ‘Something Good’, while ‘Matilda’ buys into the vocals and ‘Ms’ puts it all together.
The star of the show, though, for me, is ‘Taro’ - much like ‘Adeline’ off RELAXER, a slow-build pacing through sparkling synths and melancholy guitars, haunting vocals spinning tales afield. They’re rare cases of longer songs working to better effect, highlighted by the way that everything crashes together as waves to a shore in the final chorus, elements you’ve picked up the whole time battling their way forward to establish perfection, the culmination of endless butterfly wings crashing together into one awesome wave.
Rating: 9.5/10
Best Tracks: Dissolve Me; Taro; Something Good
Worst Tracks: Fitzpleasure