First and foremost, anyone privileged enough to be listening to this album needs to know that it took Polly Scattergood two years to create simply because she wanted to make sure every single note was exactly perfect. You can dismiss her attention to detail as time wasting, but it definitely paid off in the end for her.
Confession: I could have written this review before now, but in today’s world of disposable music I wanted to be able to listen to this album as much as possible. Typically, after I listen to something I have that mindset of moving on to the next piece to review, and so I don’t get as much time as I’d like to listen to music that I’m not reviewing, but I really need to make time to start doing just that more and it all begins with “Arrows”.
Now normally, I would dissect an album the way someone would list off ingredients for a recipe. “It’s a mix of this and this, with a little bit of that in the one song.” If I saw fit, I would pull out a lyric or two that I liked to kind of show you what you would be in for when listening to these words being sung. But since this is far from a normal album, this is going to be far from a normal album review.
If I had to write about the music and lyrics qualities of this, I would be able to publish an entire book instead of a review because I would dedicate a chapter to each song. And that is in no way an exaggeration. I would be more than willing to undertake such a task should the opportunity arise because I do enjoy “Arrows” that much.
And I also hate to throw out clichés like “This is the album of the year right here”, even though I already named the best hip hop album of the year, but this is one of the single best pieces of music I have heard: ever. We’re about halfway through the year here and I just don’t see any album that can top this, not only this year but in years to come. For me, as a reviewer of music, it’s a somewhat somber feeling because now I am constantly listening to new albums and thinking in the back of my mind, “It’s good, but it’s not “Arrows” good”.
The more times that I listened to “Arrows”, the more I liked it, although I did enjoy it from the start. You just can hear different things, little intricacies, on the third or fourth listen that you couldn’t hear on the first or second. But what I heard even more so on the additional listens was that despite the fact that sometimes songs can have a dance beat or just an all around upbeat feel to them, this is in actuality a rather sad album.
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