Re: ***Official Rank the AFTW Songs Thread***
Long-time lurker, first-time poster. Here’s how I’d rank them:
1) Snow Outside
2) Drunken Soldier
3) Broken Things
4) Rooftop
5) The Riff
6) Mercy
7) Gaucho
8) Sweet
9) Belly Full
10) Belly Belly Nice
11) If Only
A few points I’d make:
1) I don’t care for If Only, but my girlfriend – a big DMB fan, but for incredibly different reasons – loves it. Her favorite song’s Grey Street, and she loves stuff like You and Me that most of the people on this board, myself included, skip on albums and use for bathroom breaks live. Point is, it’s a song that’s going to appeal a lot more to some newer fans, or those who like DMB’s more radio-friendly stuff. I can’t fault them too much for that, even though I’ll probably be skipping it myself.
2) There are so many songs where it feels like they’re really close, but can’t quite get there. Rooftop is a solid example. It’s got a great bridge, the verses are neat, but that chorus is a total momentum-killer. I get what they were going for with it, but to me, it doesn’t work – but the potential was there. Another good example might be Gaucho. Some neat ideas there, but that chorus, and a children’s choir? Ugh.
3) There’s the three-song run of Mercy, Gaucho and Sweet. On their own, I don’t care for any of those songs. But on the album, there’s something about how they run together that really flows for me, and makes each of them quite a bit easier to stomach. That’s probably why I’ve got them grouped together the way I do.
4) Some of the lyrics are really mediocre. The “Jack and Jill” bit in Belly Belly Nice is obnoxious. The “change the game” phrase in The Riff strikes me as a lazy bit of writing in an otherwise decent song. “Oh, my love, my heart is set on you, set on you” in Broken Things doesn’t do it for me. Again, it’s just mediocre – there’s nothing unique or interesting to it, and that’s why it falls short of what I’ve come to expect from this band.
Overall, I would just say, it’s great to cross paths with the work of an artist that really speaks to you. That, though, doesn’t mean that you and the artist are living life on the same parallel path. This album doesn’t do for me anything close to what the Big Three did. That said, I still enjoy it. I’m going to keep listening – at least for a little while longer. I’ll be eager to see how some of these songs develop live. Over time, I hope I’ll come to love some of them. Until then, I’ll give this a few more listens – and then I’ll turn on something like Live at Red Rocks ’95.
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