The Daily Spin, October 5
The Last Bison | Inheritance
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: Inheritance (2013)
Artist: The Last Bison
Link:
Listening through this, I think the dominant feeling is, at best, befuddlement, and often descends into outright confusion.
It’s got the basic recipe to be decent enough music - typical folksy Americana sound, strong on the plucky strings with echoes of strings and a very campfirey sort of vocal stack to it - but man, we haven’t had an album miss this badly on vocals specifically since Veronica Swift with This Bitter Earth - which, to refresh your memory, was essentially an hour-long sung lecture. Brutal.
It’s just not a great song, all put together, and that’s effectively all she wrote for the album. It feels oddly preachy overtop these gentle strings, and when it doesn’t feel preachy, it feels weak, a butterfly facing a hurricane, and though there are moments where it all comes together alright, they’re few and far between and a lot of it just waiting for the vocals to drop out so I can enjoy what is some pretty pristine instrumentation.
Rating: 6.8/10
Best Tracks: River Rhine
Worst Tracks: Tired Hands