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novavirus · 1 year

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Album Opinions: A Lot Like Birds - No Place

I have a LOT of feelings about music, and little to no outlet for these feelings. So I’m forcibly clawing out a horrible little hole in the sand to sit in and scream about my horrible little opinions for a while.

Also here’s a notice that I don’t really know what I’m talking about most of the time, but I do my best to give important context surrounding my horrible little opinions.

That context part I was just talking about

A Lot Like Birds, baseline, has a history that is slightly more complicated than your average band.

Their first album, Plan B, is very unpopular compared to their later works, their second album especially. In between their first and second album, they saw the loss of many of their more “wacky” instrumentalists, and the addition of a new vocalist.

Kurt Travis joined the band after being kicked out of Dance Gavin Dance. This change led to a big boost in publicity which was multiplied by a shift in style to something more traditionally “Swancore”. These changes lead to Conversation Piece (the aforementioned second album), being their most popular.

Their third album, No Place, takes the more accessible sound of Conversation Piece and blends it with the band’s original more chaotic progressive roots (not to say that Conversation Piece wasn’t proggy, it was just less-so). It’s slightly less popular and most fans tend to prefer Conversation Piece (afaik), but it is definitely the album I prefer for a few main reasons.

Things this album does well!

Album “Flow”

This album manages to have a huge variety of feelings expressed throughout its conceptual journey through an abandoned house. It primarily explores the pain of “growing up”, looking at the main character’s relationship with various elements of their life by assigning each room of the old house to a song, and each feeling explored has an appropriate musical energy to match.

Even beyond the story-line of the album, the songs flow really well together. Each song in the album works really well together, with multi-song build ups and climaxes with poetic spoken-word sections to split them up (i’ll get into that in just a second).

Overall, it’s hard to get bored listening to this album. Even with some of the parts being a bit “boring”, every part fits together and makes a front to back listen very satisfying.

Song writing

Moving past the long term concepts of the album, a lot of the individual songs are just very well written. (Here’s where we get to the part where I really don’t know what I’m talking about! Don't worry about it tho). They are pretty much everything you can want from a good progressive post hardcore album. Technically dense, emotionally charged, huge amounts of variety both in between separate tracks, and within the confines of just one spot. It never feels like one vocalist overstays their welcome, both of them are constantly participating and when they take a backseat it makes sense. (also there’s a really good trumpet part somewhere. I think it’s in Recluse but I don’t remember)

It’s hard to find specific examples in this album because so much of it is so good. However, I do think the stand-out track is Connector. Connector takes everything I love about this album and condenses it into six minutes and ten seconds. It has a comfortable spot in my favorites playlist (as well as Next To Ungodliness, but I have less to say about that one).

Weird Spoken-Word Sections

A lot of the emotional climaxes of this album are separated by brief spoken-word sections from the band's harsh vocalist (from what I remember, he writes a lot of poetry in his free time). partially, I like how they affect the flow and feeling of the album. I also just, think they’re neat. Myth of Lasting Sympathy especially is such a cool track, and does a really good job letting down the energy of Connector into the slightly more subdued second half (ignoring Recluse, obviously, which is just a ridiculous track)

I imagine this is an aspect of this element that less people are gonna like, but it’s a huge plus in my opinion.

Things this album does poorly!

Not Very Much

The only thing I can really challenge about this album is that, especially in the second half, the strength of the individual tracks are kind of lacking. 60-70% of this album is not written to be enjoyed on shuffle, or listened to on loop. However, I don’t think it takes away from the album, considering that this was very obviously written with the full album in mind more than anything.

Conclusion

Overall, this is an album that has recently crept its way into some of my absolute favorites. Pretty much ever since I started getting into these styles of music, I’ve preferred the more out there progressive approaches to Swancore (bands like Hail The Sun, Eidola, Dwellings, Closure in Moscow, etc.), and I think that A Lot Like Birds has the best interpretation of this style. I really like their fourth album as well (DIVISI), and I enjoyed the projects both vocalists got into aftwards (Cory Lockwood in Sufferer, and Kurt Travis in Royal Coda), but I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if A Lot Like Birds continued off of the momentum of No Place.

Anyway, this album is just really good, and is probably one of the 5 or so albums I would consider a genuine 10/10. Listen to this album.

I put too much effort into this, but it was fun and probably something I’ll do again.

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