Is this chromatic mush?

digging the album a lot more than the assortment of youtube stuff

still pretty overwrought for my tastes.

i hate the hyper-smooth vocal aesthetic, but i can admit that you & i is very considered and strong overall
hajanga has some very pleasant timbres, rhythms, and melodies and is probably my favorite.

0:46, 1:00, & 2:28 in Flintstones - holy shit why can’t the whole song just be this, the rest is just… too damn cringey

how can he be so good in arrangement and compositional chops and so bland aesthetically? makes no sense

there are some really annoying production elements. like whatever the fuck the percussion is doing in In My Room. he really kind of butchered that song, sadly

the melody in Don’t You Know sounds like a porcupine tree vocal melody which is not a good thing :frowning:

this makes plenty of sense to me i mean this guy is kind of a shredder

yeah it does actually make sense but i want more from him

he is young

i go back and listen to this dude about once every couple of months, and my opinion hasn’t changed. all the musically revelatory stuff is confined within a frankly sour aesthetic. it’s a major turn off. god i wish he would just stop singing, or release stuff where he isn’t singing.

part of it is his vocal melodies are bunk. straight bunk. he fares much better when he’s reharmonizing something that already has a strong melody - that kind of stuff allows his talents to shine the best. flintstones is still ultra-cringe to me, but the harmonization is allowed to really go nuts because of the familiar melodic core.

when will this kid grow up or collaborate with a different singer :confused:

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Your wish is Jacob Collier’s command

In general Becca Stevens kicks major ass

oh, i remember this bathtub tune. not bad, but it has some of those annoying collier-isms, like the distracting percussion and kitchen-sink harmonic approach

also he’s still singing. someone muzzle this boy

i really like a lot of the stuff i’ve heard from him lately (djesse 3 is clearly his best work thus far) but his newest video is an absolute dogshit piece of music and it’s really making me struggle to explain why it is so horrible, critically. i’m not sure why it makes me so mad lol

this is trash!

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meanwhile this is pretty great:

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what if Owl City had watched too many music theory youtube videos

and yeah this one is dope

it’s the arrangement, it’s just a dull way of doing whatever this is
also he’s no lyricist

It’s the locus of all his weaknesses. He’s not a good vocalist, all the songs he sings are worse than all the songs he gets other people to sing, and this one doesn’t play to his relative strength (crooning) instead requiring a lot of lightness and dexterity which his jaw-heavy, ultraround sound can’t support. It’s all whimsy, his most annoying compositional tic, with no funk, which he’s pretty good at.

I think it makes you so mad because you know how good he can be!

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I dunno if I think I like it or if I just like the video. I think it’s mostly the video.

is pretty cool tbh. i can’t explain what i find so obnoxious about the music exactly but cuba’s pretty close i think

the constant recurrence of the “millennial whoop” probably contirbutes to it

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I tried to give him another chance, really I did, but I think I finally nailed down several things I don’t like about Collier’s music, and his voice is probably the biggest problem. He’s cultivated a conspicuously bad singing style: what drives me up a wall is that its all precise and colorless, because he probably thinks the overtones in a normal singing style would detract from his muddy, overstuffed harmonies.

He sings like a quantized midi file played with the cheapest, ugliest soundfont.

Also, he has the classic multi-instrumentalist flaw of just not being expressive with any instrument he plays. His entire style is a cultivated anti-expressiveness, as if any timbral richness would interfere with his self-serving perfectionism.

And his harmonic progressions are only cool when he’s pinching bits from bossa nova, and they’re still less cool than his source material (Any given Joao Gilberto tune is a thousand times richer than Collier’s entire oeuvre), because he turns everything he touches into cheesy, anemic, tasteless kitsch.

Honestly, I think he should stop making music and continue teaching music, since that seems to be what he’s actually good at.

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this is the meanest thing i’ve ever written, maybe

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kid is clearly a musical prodigy but i’m sort of waiting for him to have something worth saying in his art with all that privilege and all those connections

he’ll never miss a meal or rent for the rest of his life, that’s for certain. and good for him

there’s sort of a… reverence that is lacking with him, if that makes any sense. like the shit comes so easy to him that he doesn’t linger on the beauty of it.

whatever, kid could play me under the table with any instrument but his voice.

re singing: i agree there is sort of an ‘in’ aesthetic of hyperproduced vocals that he’s really enamored with and i lowkey hate. because the point of the voice is the imperfection of it? i dunno if I want to commit to that as a stance, but like, when you look at singers with perfect technique what you’re really looking to them for is when they absolutely push the limits of their range and abilities. like a freddie mercury, you’re enamored with him when he guns for those high notes with false fold distortion and what have you. I think a lot of modern pop music uses vocals as just another texture and it’s not really something I vibe with.

i don’t even like mayer hawthorne that much but compare this:

Mayer Hawthorne - Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out (Official Video) - YouTube

hear in “don’t wanna see your tears… baby it’ll be okay…”, you hear the underlying rasp of the voice producing the breathiness of it. that’s where the soul lives!! imo

anyways continuing to pitch peanuts from the cheap seats here but i really don’t like jacob collier’s voice, lol. it’s one place where I think he hasn’t yet understood what his limits are and either how to work on them or how to make them fit with the music he’s doing

It’s like he’s painting immaculate compositions with a palette of crayons

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