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Oh man. Their first two are fuckin stellar. I think the third one is just watered down. They went indie pop, shifting away from their more indie roots.

It’s hard to describe. They got more melodic? That doesn’t make much sense, but her voice changed from kind of a little more atonal/flat (but also full of emotion) to a more sing-songy thing. And the guitar tones were smoothed out. They just got shinier. It doesn’t work for me. Their first two albums speak to me, the emotion is raw and her singing really complements the poetry. The third album feels like…I dunno. She’s singing but doesn’t have as much to say? It’s weird and it’s all personal preference. Someone below was saying they think Hop Along’s third studio album is their best. Where I think their first is their only actually good one. I bet personally attached to whole albums.

Now, there is a kind of thing that happens with art, where you get personally attached to previously existing works and are wary of anything that comes out later. And maybe that’s factoring in some (although CC I paid attention to the last two out of three)—but id also argue that some of my favorite bands kept making newer stuff that continued to stay good and fresh. I can actually think of quite a few. So I take his entire paragraph back, I’m definitely right about the third one sucking lol

Wow. So have you been diagnosed with terrible taste or are you living in denial?

Just kidding. But go back and listen to their first major release, Get Disowned. A near perfect indie album, with enough punk sensibilities and amazing lyricism to set it apart from the pack. Not to mention it’s unique cadence, where you can tell Frances wrote the songs with her guitar, and then had the band fill in. So it’s not as produced, because the structure was there. Using the band to fill in those spaces gives the amazing lyrics a true punch of sound, because he music follows the words around the tune. It’s very unique in that right.

Compare the lyrics of Get Idsowned to Bark Your Head off, dog. It’s so clear GD was thought out, not rushed, and it was cared for and labored over…And then everything they’ve done since signing to a bigger label was so obviously written with the whole band, probably IN the studio, under the nose of a producer. It’s so…pop. Which, if you listen to Frances’ early solo stuff and the first ever “Hop Along” album, Is Something Wrong?, you’d see that’s not what she does best.

The Hop Along, Queen Ansleis album is really rough and pretty juvenile, but you can still get a sense of what set her apart in songwriting. She had a unique sound that’s been either bought out of her or that she just lost as she ran out of stories to tell.

We can have different opinions on this, but I’m very much of the opinion that even Painted Shut sucks. They lost their sound. I’ll always wonder what would’ve happened if they never signed to saddle creek and stayed on an even smaller label. I saw them a few times, they were opening for Apples In Stereo and they played Johnny Brenda’s. These are all before Painted Shut came out. But I heard the singles from that album and got that sinking feeling. It just…changed so much. And I really can’t say enough about how much the lyrical talent was sucked out of her. Because look at the poetry of GD. And then at a song like…Powerful Man. Which is one of he worst songs I’ve ever heard, not even just from bands I like otherwise. Like…the song sucks. The lyrics are trash. And they haven’t gotten better since.

The one and only. ;)