10th November
Bella Union
4/10
I want to like this album—honestly, I do. There’s so much hype and promise surrounding The Other I, but there’s something distinctly unlikeable about the whiney tones of 2:54’s singer. Complaining she’s ‘Counting the Days’ and sounding like a poor man’s Haim, this album just doesn’t make the cut.
It seems as though 2:54 don’t know what their sound is—an unpleasant crucible of early Florence and the Machine, Temples and Interpol spring to mind listening to the record; but it doesn’t sound cohesive in any way; it just sounds uncertain.
At stages of listening to ‘In the Mirror’ you can hear them take a stab at an alternative sound when the tempo of the drumbeat changes—it’s a half-assed attempt at minimalism, and it’s bad.
‘No Better Place’ is just as terrible, with a poor attempt at dynamics; they’re trying to create a sense of suspense in the song, but it’s like watching your uncle play the ukulele at your local pub—you really just want it to stop.
I can’t help but wonder what was going through their minds in the making process of this. Self-described as a ‘rock’ band, I can’t think of anything further from the truth. The genre this should be filed under is truly, utterly dull, right next to U2.
The only redeemable feature of The Other I is ‘The Monaco’, and even then, that’s a generous statement to make, because once she starts singing, it’s downhill from there.
It took dragging myself through the entire album to find the only decent song: ‘Raptor’. It isn’t as painful to listen to as the rest of the album, but it feels like I’ve just been listening to one embarrassingly long song for 30 minutes, only to get disappointed by the return of half-assed minimalism to close the record.
As a whole The Other I is just incredibly bland, repetitive and boring the whole way through.
It’s the kind of album you’d listen to just so you could talk about it to other people who are doing the same thing—pretending to be really into underground music, even though it’s unrefined and mostly shit. Maybe Stockholm syndrome will improve the sound.
