RevMatt wrote:I've gone back and forth with "Yvette". At first I really liked it, a contemporary justified murder ballad. But after several listens there are a few things I have problems with. 1) The relationship with the narrator and the girl is never made clear. From the song it sounds like she is just a fellow high school student. Nothing to indicate that she is a girlfriend. So why did he end of stalking her house and peeping in her windows? 2) The Weatherby indicates to me that this is a well off community as Weatherby's are expensive rifles. The narrator's outrage is understandable. But in a more affluent community things are usually handled by contacting the authorities. I don't see how he is driven to murder UNLESS she is his girlfriend. The lyric, however, indicates she is nothing more than a fellow student. A kid in an affluent high school who learns that a fellow student is being molested by her father is more likely to go to the authorities -- family protective services, the police, a school counselor -- with the information he knows. Jason didn't really "sell" me that the narrator would have the girl's father in his sites and his weapon locked and loaded.
Dude, for real?
It's the crack talkin'
Not the crack, the twelve hour drive from Kentucky to NJ. The only thing I had to keep me from dreading the party with my ex inlaws at the end of the drive was analyzing the cd as it played.
I have nowhere else to go. There is no demand in the priesthood for elderly drug addicts
Not the crack, the twelve hour drive from Kentucky to NJ. The only thing I had to keep me from dreading the party with my ex inlaws at the end of the drive was analyzing the cd as it played.
I can't speak for RevMatt, but thinking about music is pretty much crack for me. The only virtue to analyzing music is that it's cheaper than buying it.
The sooner we put those assholes in the grave&piss on the dirt above it, the better off we'll be
Not the crack, the twelve hour drive from Kentucky to NJ. The only thing I had to keep me from dreading the party with my ex inlaws at the end of the drive was analyzing the cd as it played.
I can't speak for RevMatt, but thinking about music is pretty much crack for me. The only virtue to analyzing music is that it's cheaper than buying it.
Believe it or not, I'm even worse when it comes to analyzing things like movies, novels, short stories or shows like Mad Men.
I have nowhere else to go. There is no demand in the priesthood for elderly drug addicts
So after my first listen I'm convinced Super 8 sounds exactly like another song (prob more then one) that I just can't place gonna drive me crazy every time I hear it now.
jarofdirt wrote:Late to the party on this one, but I have been listening to this album for three weeks today and it is the only thing I have been listening to. I love it. My favorite album of the past couple of years. I liked "Here We Rest", I did skip a few songs on that album though. I judge how good this album is based on the fact that my favorite song on "Southeastern" has changed multiple times without my losing interest in any of the other songs that I considered a favorite upon first listen. It started out as "Cover Me Up" then it was "Elephant". After a few days I couldn't stop listening to some of the songs that didn't stick out to me as much on the first couple of listens. "Different Days", "Flying Over Water" and "New South Wales" are my three favorites at the moment in no particular order.
I read in an interview that "Yvette" was meant as a companion piece to "Daisy Mae" and can definitely hear that with it's subject matter.
It seems as though my least favorite song on the album is in everyone else's top group. "Live Oak" just doesn't grab me the way that the rest of the album has. I still don't hate it and don't skip it. I actually don't skip any song on the album and haven't, though I will restart a track here and there just to listen to it again.
I usually reserve comment on an album until the "newness" has worn off for me. That has yet to even begin to happen with "Southeastern". I love finding albums that I can listen to all the way through over and over without ever getting tired of a song on it. This is one of those albums for me.
My feelings exactly. Every time I listen to music now, I want to hear that album, and I'm still not sick of it! My current favorites are Stockholm, Songs That She Sang in the Shower, and Relatively Easy.
Sub wrote:So after my first listen I'm convinced Super 8 sounds exactly like another song (prob more then one) that I just can't place gonna drive me crazy every time I hear it now.
Good examples but not the song I'm thinking of. Must be tons out there with similar structure. I'll ponder on it some more and see if I can figure it out.
Yeah, it's definitely riffing on a more conventional structure than some of the others, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's got a similar thing going on to a number of other songs.
Sub wrote:So after my first listen I'm convinced Super 8 sounds exactly like another song (prob more then one) that I just can't place gonna drive me crazy every time I hear it now.
Lol that was what sister suggested. Can't say I don't here the similarities.
I'm probably thinking of two separate songs with the chorus and verses i even dug into some dierks on spotify to see if something sunk in my head and Jason was giving him the middle finger but nothing was as close as I'm thinking.
Sub wrote:So after my first listen I'm convinced Super 8 sounds exactly like another song (prob more then one) that I just can't place gonna drive me crazy every time I hear it now.
HOLY SHIT! This totally explains why I randomly started singing this in the shower the other day. I hope so anyway....
Never going back to Buttholeville. (Good luck with that!)
As I suspected would happen, this album has grown on me. I wasn't sure about Southeastern the first few times I gave it a spin other than Elephant, Cover Me Up, and Traveling Alone. But now after a few weeks of listening I've finally come around. I love every second of it!
Turn you demons into walls of goddamned noise and sound.
did anyone ever get an answer about the iTunes bonus track demo version of "Elephant" that was the same as the album version? did they ever correct that?
It’s an epic rebuke of those hideous cancer ballads that infected mainstream country music for so many years; when Rascal Flatts hear a line like, “There’s one thing that’s real clear to me: No one dies with dignity,” they ought to just pack in their Ed Hardy shirts and head home.
Oh man, that's fantastic
And I knew when I woke up Rock N Roll would be here forever
Agreed. Back when I used to read Rolling Stone (circa mid to late '90's) when I believe it was still a decent mag, I knew you could always rely on their ratings. Very rarely did you see them give a release 5 stars. 3.5 is very good. On the other side of the spectrum, go ahead and look at Amazon.com reviews - way too many 5 stars. Very liberal. I'm trying to think of the last Rolling Stone 5-star review I saw. Lucinda Williams "Car Wheels..."? Not sure on that one. Definitely not Led Zep. Ha!
Zip City wrote:
LastLawson wrote:I don't know how Rolling Stone can justify giving this a 3.5 rating...
3.5 is very good for RS
4 stars means brilliant, while 5 stars is reserved for Dylan reissues
I would love to see RS cover more of the bands we all like, but they'd probably sell a lot fewer copies. I agree that some of their political (small p)/contemporary issues coverage is very good. Their star rating system is pretty mixed, and they have a pattern I've noticed in other magazine where the stars don't always line up with the article, like they were produced separately or something.
That said, I'd go with maybe 3.5-4/5 for Southeastern based on RS markers (though I'd sure rank a lot of their reviewed albums much lower than they do). I think Southeastern is a really good album that hits quite a few high points along the way. There's several really great songs IMO (I'd include Cover Me Up, Stockholm, Elephant, Different Days and Songs She Sang among those) and some really great sections in other songs, most have gifted lyrics, and Jason's singing is better than ever. The downsides for me are too much similarity in musical and lyrical themes, and the sparseness of the arrangements generally. All said, though, congrats a bunch to Jason for getting his shit together and finding a path toward being paid for his talents while not writing Nashville pablum that would suck his soul dry if he had to play it the rest of his life, and I look forward to his next rock album when that comes and hopefully a show or two before that point if I can ever get my schedule to line up.
Last edited by lotusamerica on Sat Jul 20, 2013 10:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
This album has done amazing things for Jason. I remember a year or so ago I was hearing his crowds were meager and he was getting frustrated with the whole thing. Fast forward to today, I just bought my tickets for his Ryman show next month and there are only 30 or so left.
211poundsofpork wrote:Agreed. Back when I used to read Rolling Stone (circa mid to late '90's) when I believe it was still a decent mag, I knew you could always rely on their ratings. Very rarely did you see them give a release 5 stars. 3.5 is very good. On the other side of the spectrum, go ahead and look at Amazon.com reviews - way too many 5 stars. Very liberal. I'm trying to think of the last Rolling Stone 5-star review I saw. Lucinda Williams "Car Wheels..."? Not sure on that one. Definitely not Led Zep. Ha!
Zip City wrote:
LastLawson wrote:I don't know how Rolling Stone can justify giving this a 3.5 rating...
3.5 is very good for RS
4 stars means brilliant, while 5 stars is reserved for Dylan reissues
The thing is Rolling Stone still has a few good people who right reviews (Mark Kemp, Rob Sheffield, David Fricke) and if one of those is writing it I'll pay attention, unfortunately they also seem to have a bunch of corporate shills on the reviewing roster as well. You take the good with the bad.
As far as star ratings go though I've been guilty of writing 5 star reviews myself for records that were really wowing me (back in the day for a few publications and even in the last ten years on Amazon and the like) and I was usually wrong for giving those marks. I think the correct way to think about it is to think of a 5 star album and see how the one you're reviewing stacks up. OK, so let's take Exile on Main Street as a 5 star benchmark, after thinking about that it's pretty hard to give any a record the same star rating. Given that I would probably give Southeastern a solid 4, so given that it's RS I'd say 3.5 ain't half bad.
We call him Scooby Do, but Scooby doesn’t do. Scooby, is not involved
