The Daily Spin, November 17
ODESZA | The Last Goodbye
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 Last Goodbye (2022)
Artist: ODESZA
Link:
I’ve realized, only as I sit down to write this, that I kinda freaked it by not reviewing ODESZA’s four albums in order of their release. Though it’s not a desperate need - and though we haven’t stuck to that convention previously, I’m realizing that it would have been a nice through-line. The evolution of my favorite artist’s sound as I evolve as a reviewer (hopefully - I don’t know sometimes.)
At the end of the day, this is and will always be a very good piece of music, to me. It’s right in that wheelhouse of indietronica that I love so much, and though ODESZA have, over the past few years, migrated to a poppier sound instead of the big room influences that drew me into loving them with In Return, it’s still a deeply talented duo continuing to do what they arguably do best.
It’s funny, then, that this poppier leaning tends to be the weakest part of the album for me - outside of ‘Forgive Me’, I feel like most of the by-track ranking for me holds the poppier, upbeat tracks towards the bottom - I think because of the incongruity displayed. ODESZA built their career on this fantastically vast sound - it’s why songs like ‘Always This Late’ or ‘Bloom’ will forever be favorites of mine, because they take you and drop you into the deepest reaches of space, before surrounding you with the light of a supernova. The more upbeat offerings on this album have a sort of plasticky varnish to them - lukewarm instead of boiling, as though there’s something keeping it from reaching its full height.
The instrumentals, though, and the songs where ODESZA do slow it down and let the build really hit you - those are FANTASTIC. Both the opener and the closer feature a piano, slow and steady, a gently undulating force that guides you but never yanks you along, and it allows the brass and the bleeding energy to focus in on the music to build itself higher, skyward.
When the album was released, and the title was known - The Last Goodbye - I think we all had a moment of “is this really it?” - and to me, that’s what this album will stand up against. If this was their final release, would I be pleased? Would this be an acceptable legacy for a group that has indelibly shaped who I am, what I listen to, the fabric of how I present myself?
I think so.
Rating: 9.0/10
Best Tracks: Light Of Day; Better Now; North Garden
Worst Tracks: Equal