Weekly Album: Week of 05/14 - 05/20 - Hornet Disaster

I was supposed to listen to Hornet Disaster by Weatherday during the week of May 14th to May 20th, but I didn't. So I listened to it this week instead. I discovered this album through being a fan of the Twitch streamer Northernlion. The Northernlion fan/stream editor known as the Librarian posted about how a song on this album sampled Northernlion. This song was "Chopland Sedans" the title and introductory sample coming from a stream where NL was playing a quiz on the website Sporcle where he had to figure out the name of an NBA team based on a series of images. One of these was an image of a man chopping wood, a plane landing, two sedans, and between the sedans was a (presumably) English historical figure who I didn't recognize. This led him to jokingly say "It's the Chopland Sedans" when really it was the Cleveland Cavaliers. That line was then sampled in the song off of this album, leading me to discover it. Right off the bat I need to talk about how long this album is for how similar most of the songs are. This album is 1 hour and 16 minutes long according to Spotify. This is already a length that scares me a little bit, anything over 50 minutes starts to feel excessive to me and would need to be justified by some really cool songs that cover a bit of a wider range, either through jamming or just by varying how they sound. This album does neither of those things. Almost all of the songs are this kind of Emo influenced Indie Rock and Power Pop. While it does stray from this occasionally, such as on the track "Ripped Apart By Hands", most of the album stays in this style with similar tempos and song structures most of the way through. This makes the album a slog to get through! It pains me because on a song by song basis, the songs are pretty good! They hit most of the marks for what I want out of music like this. They have fun melodies and they rock pretty hard. There is fantastic guitar work all over the album. I will say the production quality is quite lacking, but I think that it is a bit of an intentional choice to add to the noise of it all, but it does clip rather often on so I take some issue with it. Even the lyrics are interesting, from what I can tell they make a lot of callbacks to other songs on the album and share some connected themes about relationships and the struggles of them. But due to the album's length it all blends together and doesn't sound as interesting as it would if it were shorter and more concentrated. I think it would be quite interesting to see an edited version that takes the 10 to 12 best songs on the album to really concentrate the album's best qualities. 6.5/10