Acclaimed Music Forums

Welcome to Round 2.3 of Moderately Acclaimed Albums 2019!

Vote for your favorite album in each match-up.
Remember, anyone can vote as long as the voter has heard both albums.

Good-spirited comments are encouraged, but not absolutely necessary.
Deadline = August 13th at 10am EST.
*** Vacation Alert!!!*** I will be away from my normal communication channels next week but will try hard to post results as close to the deadline as possible. However, please be aware there might be a delay!

Here's a link to the bracket for the entire tournament:
http://www.bracketmaker.com/tlist.cfm?t ... Moderately Acclaimed Albums 2019

Match-ups:
1. Crowded House - Woodface vs. Mogwai - Young Team
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain vs. múm - Finally We Are No One
3. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges vs. Micachu - Jewellery
4. Peter Gabriel - Us vs. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat)

Summer summer summertime
Time to sit back and unwind!

Before I forget it again here at least my two favorites

1. Crowded House - Woodface vs. Mogwai - Young Team
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain vs. múm - Finally We Are No One

Woodface 71 - Young Team 67
Finally We Are No One 84 - Felt Mountain 71
New History Warfare 98 - Jewelery 76
Us 78 - The Guide 74

1. Mogwai - Young Team
3. Micachu - Jewellery

My picks:
1. Crowded House - Woodface vs. Mogwai - Young Team
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain vs. múm - Finally We Are No One
3. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges vs. Micachu - Jewellery
4. Peter Gabriel - Us vs. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat)

Thanks!

1. Crowded House - Woodface vs. Mogwai - Young Team
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain vs. múm - Finally We Are No One
3. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges vs. Micachu - Jewellery
4. Peter Gabriel - Us vs. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat)

1. Mogwai - Young Team
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain
3. Micachu - Jewellery
4. Peter Gabriel - Us

Crowded House - Woodface
Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain
Peter Gabriel - Us

Mogwai - Young Team
Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain
Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat)

1. Crowded House - Woodface (9/10) vs. Mogwai - Young Team (9/10) - very tight matchup. My preference will go towards the more creative side.
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain (7/10) vs. múm - Finally We Are No One (9/10)
3. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (6/10) vs. Micachu - Jewellery (8/10)
4. Peter Gabriel - Us (7/10) vs. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat) (TBA)

CROWDED HOUSE - WOODFACE

Flat production hinders my appreciation of Woodface, despite the presence of the likes of Fall at Your Feet where Crowded House sound at their most yearning.

Will need to commit myself to more listens but Young Team already seems to have just the right balance between noise and ambience with equal propensity for excitement in either setting.

Woodface loses out to Young Team.

5. Crowded House - Woodface (1991) vs. 4. Mogwai - Mogwai Young Team (1997)
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain (2000) vs. 3. múm - Finally We Are No One (2002)
6. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges (2011) vs. 8. Micachu - Jewellery (2009)
7. Peter Gabriel - Us (1992) vs. 1. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat) (1994)

Re: Peter Gabriel - Us (1992) vs. 1. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat) (1994)

Perhaps this has been noted elsewhere, but (aside from the "In Your Eyes" collaboration between these two) has anyone noticed the similarity in album covers? Interesting match-up.

Brad wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2019 2:34 pm Re: Peter Gabriel - Us (1992) vs. 1. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat) (1994)

Perhaps this has been noted elsewhere, but (aside from the "In Your Eyes" collaboration between these two) has anyone noticed the similarity in album covers? Interesting match-up.

Oh yeah, you're right! Both albums also apparently feature Senegalese percussionists Babacar Faye and Assane Thiam. Might not be a surprise if they mix in the same circles as their countryman (I don't know either way), Gabriel may have even heard them from a previous N'Dour album if so but it's still uncanny for the albums to be paired.

Two chill albums with Felt Mountain vs. Finally We Are No One. Everyone could spot the influences in Felt Mountain but I still think it's not fully like anything else, certainly not in Goldfrapp's catalogue as much as I like the fact they change style every album. It's epic yet subtle, languorous yet unsettling, not a bad track on it.

I found the vocals on Finally We Are No One to be a tad cloying, which isn't ultimately an issue when so much of it is instrumental. There's enough experimentation as well to keep the childlike mood of the album charming.

That said, Felt Mountain pulls ahead of Finally We Are No One.

GOLDFRAPP - FELT MOUNTAIN

Judges is the third album this week after Young Team and Finally We Are No One that works better when the vocals disappear (apart from on the devastating Lord I Just Can't Keep from Crying Sometimes). It doesn't need words for the main, producing evocative scenes of war and strong, varied tunes allegedly all in one take.

The problem I have with Jewellery is practically all of its songs run out of steam or stop just as they're building momentum. At its most stripped back, mind you, it's home to some solid off-kilter pop songs like Golden Phone.

New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges gallops to victory over Jewellery.

During Round 1 there was a week I couldn't do all the reviews and I said that I would do the ones I missed that went on to the next round when they would appear again. So here we are:

Crowded House – Woodface
Woodface is a perfectly fine album that just fails to be great. It is filled with melody and a pleasant production. After hearing it three times everything sticks in the mind, even if it is hard to recall them after the fact. So I can rarely say I feel these songs. Most of them are just a little too average or lack a little edge to make them truly memorable. Weather With You, a personal favorite, sticks out a little too much, as it has instrumental flourishes that are simply found nowhere else. There are couple of other highlights – Four Seasons in One Day, the cheeky There Goes God and Fall A Your Feet – but most just don’t elevate this album to more than ‘kind of nice’. And Italian Plastic is a pretty bad song.
The cover art is great, by the way.

Goldfrapp – Felt Mountain
I was a bit surprised the first time I heard Felt Mountain, because the only two songs I knew from it – Lovely Head and Utopia – do not quite prepare you for what you are in for. That is not to say that these two feel out of place here; far from it. They are a good part of the whole picture. Nonetheless, those songs, although unconventional, are at heart still pop songs. The other tracks not so much. These are more soundscapes, with Alison Goldfrapp’s voice providing not so much the human element, but rather the most alien part. She hardly focusses on words, but more on mood. Her voice is astonishingly beautiful and capable of making songs sound lush, romantic, erotic or curiously nasty.

It’s too much to say that the album itself is built around Goldfrapp’s vocals, as it mostly seems to seek the boundaries of trip-hop, to see where it will break. Lovely Head is the song that is most traditional trip-hop: like much of its genre it feels like the opening of a James Bond movie. The rest could sometimes fill the background music to some of the scenes, although a true action piece is missing and I’m not sure if James Bond ever finds a place for the carnivalesque Oompah Radar or the unsettling Deer Stop.

I didn’t particularly care for this album at first, maybe because of wrong expectations, but it has clicked by now. Trip-hop, besides being strangely suited to the lives of movie spies, can also provide great dreamscapes and this album does so remarkably; even better than most dream pop. It’s just so ethereal, it can’t help but transport you to worlds were the mountains may be made of felt.

Peter Gabriel – Us
The comparisons made between Peter Gabriel’s Us and Youssou N’Dour’s The Guide are interesting. Both feel like spiritual albums, though in a very easy to take way. In case of N’Dour a little too easy, because as I said in the review for his album: it feels like an African variation of easy listening, despite a couple of strong tracks. Gabriel flirts with easy listening too, but he has a lot of good songs here that have just enough heft to make it something more. His voice on particular seems to contain a more deeper sense of yearning, whereas N’Dour seems more eager to please.

Having said all that, Us doesn’t quite have the spiritual depth of Gabriel’s soundtrack for The Last Tempatation of Christ and I sometimes miss the idiosyncratic weirdness and daring of his earlier work here. Nonetheless, there is something earnest about Gabriel that might always have been his strongest suit. No matter what he sings about and what genre he is trying out, you can feel his heart firmly beating and that is what you need in the end.

I already did the album by Colin Stetson.

Now for the votes:
7. Crowded House - Woodface vs. 1. Mogwai - Young Team
3. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain vs. 6. múm - Finally We Are No One
2. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges vs. 5. Micachu - Jewellery
4. Peter Gabriel - Us vs. 8. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat)

MICACHU - JEWELLERY

1 | Crowded House | Woodface
2 | Mogwai | Young Team

3 | Goldfrapp | Felt Mountain
6 | múm | Finally We Are No One

4 | Colin Stetson | New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
8 | Micachu | Jewellery

7 | Peter Gabriel | Us
5 | Youssou N'Dour | The Guide (Wommat)

Us sounds like it's making a statement about relationships that feels too grandiose at times to fully resonate. Still, there's an playfulness in Gabriel's use of exotic instrumentation within Western song structure that is to be admired.

Wommat sounds like a further compromised take on 'world music', to use the term from that time. The fusion of genres doesn't come across as organic, which may or may not account for the album's torpor. Brief interludes of highlife-style guitars present themselves as welcome signs of life.

Us stumbles past The Guide (Wommat).

PETER GABRIEL - US

1. Mogwai - Young Team
2. múm - Finally We Are No One

1. Woodface > 2. Young Team
5. Felt Mountain < 4. Finally We Are No One
3. New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges > 8. Jewellery
7. Us < 6. The Guide (Wommat)

Winners in red:

1. Crowded House - Woodface vs. Mogwai - Young Team
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain vs. múm - Finally We Are No One
4. Peter Gabriel - Us vs. Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat)

17 total voters this week:
acroamor
Bang Jan
bonnielaurel
Brad
DaveC
FrankLotion
Honorio
Jirin
Kingoftonga
madzong
mileswide
Nassim
Rdwdbob
Rob
rumpdoll
Safetycat
spiritualized

1. Mogwai - Young Team over Crowded House - Woodface 11-6
2. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain over múm - Finally We Are No One 10-6
3. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges over Micachu - Jewellery 9-4
4. Peter Gabriel - Us over Youssou N'Dour - The Guide (Wommat) 8-5

Round 2.4 up next!