SongsToSleepTo

Figured it was time to do my occasional check-in on BONES. This dude confuses me to the extreme. I constantly find songs by him that I absolutely love but anytime I listen to a "full" project by him, it's mediocre at best. I suppose when he releases as much music as he does, he's bound to hit the target every once in a blue moon. This album doesn't really seem to land at almost any point. The emo screaming on "HouseMadeOfSticks" is just downright hard to listen to. While most of the rest of the album doesn't drop that low in quality, it is just boring. His albums are always short but typically his rap style and eerie production really work well with the format. This album doesn't feature any traditional BONES production or rapping which he has been straying away from in recent years. BONES is definitely one of the artists that people will be nostalgic for his older work, and typically it's because the new style doesn't meld well with how the old fans' personalities age, but in this case, BONES has just started making worse music in a different genre. The only redeeming quality here is when he briefly finds the light on what this genre could sound like if he put a bit more thought and effort in it. "SuitYourself" and "TallPaleAndUgly" feature some vocal effects that make his vocals more spacious matching the midwest light guitar a bit better. When his vocals are at the forefront of the production, he losses the atmosphere that could be there. Overall though, even if he did capitalize on this throughout the rest of the album, it still misses interesting verses, gripping choruses, and it has an abundance of dead air where boring production just plays... and plays... and plays. Somehow it still only manages to be 26 minutes in total.