You’re listening to the wrong albums then. Yes, a lot of them are just grab bags of songs recently recorded. In fact, most of them are. But there are plenty of albums that have more artistry than just within the songs themselves.
Even stuff like the Taylor Swift albums have cohesive sounds/moods to them, at least to me. Something like, say, folklore is miles away from 1989, which itself is quite a departure from, say, her debut. They are all quite different moods to me. It doesn’t have to have an overarching story arc, but a good album has songs that all more-or-less gel together. The idea of an album just being a random mish-mash of songs that don’t go together is the odd idea to me.
Pretty much everything I listen to I don’t understand the lyrics. Even if they are in English. I just don’t listen or pay attention to the actual words. The voice is just another instrument to me. And most times when I actually do find out the words, it’s usually pretty dumb.
And it’s just amazing to me that this is just amazing to you.
Maybe this is at least semi-off-topic, because the focus of the thread seems to be on the “in a language you don’t understand” part rather than the “Do you listen to albums” part. But I do wonder now if there’s a connection between not caring about lyrics and not caring about albums.
The Hu, Wardruna, Rammstein (but I speak German), Goran Bregovic’ score for Underground, the filmscore for Waltz with Bashir and Vladimir Vyssotsky. And Brel. Occasionally Paolo Conte and of course Manu Chao. But I’m Dutch so pretty used to foreign languages. We don’t have that many native speakers.
Just yesterday I listened to Close to the Edge by Yes:
Sudden call shouldn’t take away the startled memory
All in all, the journey takes you all the way
As apart from any reality that you’ve ever seen and known
Guessing problems only to deceive the mention,
Passing paths that climb halfway into the void
As we cross from side to side, we hear the total mass retain
I’ve listened to that album for more than 50 years, and I still don’t understand it. I love it, but I don’t understand it.
I can listen to Brazilian music hours on end (mainly Bossa Nova) and never get tired of it. Don’t understand much of it, except they really like saying “voce” and “saudade”.
Woudl the Cocteau Twins count? From what I gather, thought there’s a fair bit of English and Scots Gaelic mixed in, Elizabeth Fraser sings in a made-up language (I only really know one album, the brilliant Heaven or Las Vegas, so any bigger Cocteau Twins fan, please correct me if I’ve widely missed the mark).
I was thinking this myself. When the link to Sigur Ros was posted earlier, I expected it to go to Cocteau Twins.
I have no choice. I can’t make out the lyrics in most music in any language.
Many. Recently have listened to:
(German) Nena - Willst du mit mir gehen
(Japanese) Sadistic Mika Band - Hot!
(Japanese) Atarashii Gakko - Wakage
(Portuguese) Seu Jorge - Life Aquatic (Bowie Covers)
Hungarian rock n’ roll can be rewarding; at least, I have this album by Locomotiv GT.
The band is best known for the hit “Rock Yourself” (1976). Not all of their songs would fly these days, in particular “She’s Just 14”.
Shades of
But all four of them together aren’t nearly as creepy as Mardones. Yowza!
Absolutely, a lot more frequently than I probably realise. I have all of the Yaala Yaala label albums, and a near complete collection of Sublime Frequencies albums. I’m also a big fan of 60’s Eastern pop music (lots from Thailand, China, and Vietnam). I want to say my collection is about 30% music with lyrics in a language I don’t understand. It doesn’t stop me from singing along with them. I figure if it worked for the Cocteau Twins, it’ll work for me.
for me it’s Fado—Portuguese blues
Almost never. I can’t think of any situation where I would buy or download an album that was primarily in a language I didn’t understand, unless it was for some other purpose than leisure listening (like, say, teaching students what troubadour lyrics sounded like in performance). There are some albums I listen to regularly that have some songs in other languages, mostly Irish; and one entire album of Burns’s poetry set to music that is, I guess, technically in Scots, but as a native speaker of English I can understand it just fine.
I just … don’t get the appeal of listening to songs you can’t understand, at least not for any sustained amount of time. (I don’t really get the appeal of purely instrumental music either, come to think of it; like, classical or jazz-without-vocals is fine as background music and I don’t go out of my way to avoid it, but I would never seek it out, either.)
Depends on the mission.
Music as background is far better without understandable vocals. Music to sit down and pay attention to as the main focus of your brain does better with understandable vocals.
For me that latter case lasts about 90 seconds tops before I’m bored shitless and need something else to think about. So then it’s time to go back to nonvocals.
That’s a very interesting idea you have. I have always loved instrumental music, e.g. classical, so it’s a simple step from there to music with vocals in a language I don’t understand. It’s just another musical instrument to me.
Ha! When I lived in Mexico circa 2000, he was popular. His hits were typically in three or four languages in a single song (a line in English, then a phrase in French, a couple lines of Spanish…) — recognizable words, but strung together to make a mishmash of gobbledegook. Loved it.
The actual trick to understanding what Jon Anderson is going on about is to consider alternate meanings of each word or phrase.
“Faster moment spent spread tales of change within the sound.”
Faster moment spent – an event happened quickly just now. The sound isn’t what you hear, but a body of water. So, if something just suddenly jumped into the water, startling you, there are going to be ripples – the tales of change that occurred as a result of the splash. The rest of the song more or less uses that event as a metaphor for listening and responding to music, another definition of sound. Do you see how it works? It’s like a British crossword.
To sum up what the verse you quoted says to me (and this is only my interpretation): When you are called to your spiritual journey, the suddenness of the calling shouldn’t negate anything you’ve learned in life before. When you embark on your spiritual journey, it’s a lifetime commitment, but the reward is that you will gain cosmic knowledge unlike anything you’d previously considered. Hurdles you might come across may not actually be hurdles. Your journey will lead you somewhere, but not into the void, because you’re passing paths that would lead you astray up. On our journeys, we’ll perceive that what we learn as we go is universal, and that the lessons it teaches you were always there to begin with.
That phrase “total mass retain” is a sentence or clause with a subject but without an object, which is a frequent lyrical device for Jon Anderson. They do make sense but they have their own logic.