13 Tracks Of Good Music With An Extra Half An Hour Added For Good Measure
Notes Of A Conditional Form is the new album by the British band The 1975. They originally found fame with songs like Chocolate on their self titled album back in 2013, and have been achieving success ever since.
I’ve never been the biggest 1975 fan but, over time, have listened to almost all their music and respect them greatly as artists. Having said that, all these songs presented together as an album was something I found disappointing.
As a whole, the band seems to have moved sonicly to a much more lo-fi and indie direction here. The album started off strong with "The 1975", a lovely piece built around a speech given by the climate activist Greta Thunberg. Followed by "People' 'which, even though it probably is one of my favourite tracks on the album, seems out of place being the only one with a heavy rock feel. It continued with "Frail State Of Mind '' one of the catchier songs together with the later played "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)". On first listen the first couple of beat-based tracks such as "Streaming" and "Yeah I know" stood out as interesting experiments into how they might develop their music moving forward (even though I wasn't convinced about how well they worked as a finished piece as of right now). As I moved through the album there were a couple more songs that really stood out, like the more acoustic feeling "Playing on My Mind","Guys'' or the melodic stance of “Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied”. But I found it also continued with an amount of their underdeveloped beat-based melodies like "Having No Head". If you are going to release an almost one and a half hour album it needs to have variety packed into it. Too many of these songs felt similar or a variation on what you had just listened to.
Most albums benefit from having a defined structure. Even if the lyrics don’t have a running thread the songs tend to feel like they should precede each other. I hardly ever shuffle play albums for this reason. Most of the time you can tell the artists spent a long time placing them in a perfect order and it feels wrong to ignore that bit of work. After finishing listening to Notes Of A Conditional Form for the first time I listened to it again shuffle playing it. With the exception of opening track "The 1975", my experience of listening to the other 21 songs didn’t change at all. There didn’t feel like any reason that they were an album. They sounded like good songs but with no cohesion between them.
This lack of cohesion made me feel less inclined to listen to the whole thing in one go. With it being so long I wanted to be immersed in it but, as it stands, a song you could get into like “The Birthday Party” is followed by “Yeah I know” which feels like a typical synth romp for 4 minutes straight. I think there is truly an album made of great songs on there. They are well-written, well played, and yes they might not be exactly to my taste but I do see why others will love them. They are just not the whole album. When I went through and picked out the tracks that really made an impact I was left with 12 or 13. As a piece of work I would rather have seen fewer tracks as part of this particular collection.
Generally I would tell people to give this a quick listen and see what they think for themselves but there's nothing quick about something that takes over one hour and twenty minutes to listen to. Quantity doesn’t always result in quality. Releasing a 22 track album is a tall order for anyone and I’m just not sure if it worked in this particular case. It is a shame because if it was a different, shorter version, I really feel like I could have grown to love Notes On A Conditional Form in a way that probably won’t ever happen now.
Written by Alexa Davyd
Commenti