Varmints

This is my favourite album of all time. Absolutely mind blowing experience, genre bending, including the likes of classical, experimental, pop, electronic, indie rock, ambient, Dubstep, and much more. It's truly incredible.

EDIT:
I've been meaning to edit this review considering this is... my favourite album of all time now. When I first found this site in August 2023, I had a personal ranking on a spreadsheet of around 200 albums already ranked, from 2020-2023, all of which were solely numerical rankings and no reviews. I decided I wanted to add actual reviews though, so the majority of them ended up being like one or two sentences about the album, my top 3 songs, and then posting it, like this one. But now I kind of want to come back to many of these and give more in depth reviews because they deserve them.

So let's do that, starting with this album. This is my favourite album of all time. However, when I first found it, I would not have even considered it in my top 100 albums of all time. Why is that? Because the sound on this is INCREDIBLY POLARIZING. People always talk about "easy listening" music, well to me, this album would be quite literally the definition of "hard listening" music. I mean, just starting it out, with the first track, Nautilus, your ears are absolutely POUNDED With these THICK trumpets and electronics and the song does not give you a single moment to breathe. Instantly it sounds genuinely like nothing else you've ever heard before, and the rest of the album does NOT stop.

When I first heard this album, the majority of the songs I did not like very much, especially the back half of this album after "The Vapours", I hated all of those songs. However some did stick out to me instantly. Scrimshaw and R-Type had truly two of the most incredible builds in songs I had ever heard at that point, and I fully transfixed myself onto those two tracks. It probably helped that those two were probably the most "traditionally electronic" sounding ones on the album, but even then they still were incredibly unique.

It took me another couple of months to warm up to more of the songs here, and it happened really slowly over time. Nautilus I was quick to warm up to, as it was also more "traditionally" electronic, and the vapours as well, because while it didn't have the same kind of build that R-Type and Scrimshaw had (which is what especially had drawn me into them in the first place), it was a god damn strange song with the constant time signature switches happening so often and yet sounding so natural to the song.

All of these songs that I was into were all the electronic non-lyrical ones. It took another couple months for me to warm up to those, but eventually one day I found myself absolutely ascending to them. Taken, Something Helpful, and Dowager in specific. Admittedly, I think the vocals on these are especially hard to get into because they're so different from other artists, and admittedly, not as strong as most other artists, but I honestly now think they work really well with the songs, but that might just be because I've listened to them so much now. But the way Anna does pop music within these 3 songs is just so... unique to all other pop music I've heard, and so heavily built on these massive buildups throughout the entirety of each song.

At this point, I finally loved the first two thirds of the album, but still hated those last four songs. Once again it was another couple of months before I finally warmed up to Last Rose and Shill. I still view these four final tracks as radically different to the first seven. The first seven are so focussed on massive builds, and really put together structure, while the last four are less so. Last Rose is another pop adjacent song which still has a good buildup, but it's much more mellow, which honestly works well as the album slows down towards the end. I sort of view this one as Something Helpful's more chill little sister. Then Shill completely breaks everything that I just said about this being the end of the album, because this is experimental insanity. You cannot get a grasp on anything going through this song. The structure is severely broken and glitched out to maximum hell, but eventually I learned to appreciate it for that, because the juxtaposition between this and Last Rose is honestly quite funny. You think we're coming to a slow end? NOPE! Like I said. "hard listening" music.

And then finally, Honeyed Words, and Blackfriars. These two are the ambient leaning pieces of the album. Blackfriars I was finally able to warm up to specifically in the context of being the closer. Like, we had all the fun and craziness of the rest of the album, it was a good time, but it's time to chill out and unwind. It's like watching a show or reading a book to unwind at the end of a busy day. Honeyed Words, I still do have trouble with to this day, however I do appreciate it as an interlude between the two sections of the albums. I'm honestly not the biggest fan of it, it was my least favourite song on the album from when I first listened to now, but I have grown to appreciate it with the context of the album.

So what does this mean? I don't know. I just absolutely love this album. If you give it a listen and you hate it, yeah, that makes sense. It's really difficult to get into with how different it sounds to everything else, but I beg of you if you are into experimental artists such as SOPHIE, Arca, Dan Deacon, Bjork, give this album a try, even multiple tries, because it took a lot of listens for me to really appreciate everything on this album. But now that I have, I can finally really appreciate how bold and unique it is, and I can say that this is my favourite album of all time.

TOP 3 SONGS: R-Type, Scrimshaw, The Vapours