There's really no artist like Sam Ray for me. The love/hate relationship I have with his music is completely unmatched by any other artist. I absolutely loathe what his music is, I hate what it means for rock music, I hate the ideology of emasculation that his music encapsulates, I hate the sloppy production for the sake of looking cool, I hate the sloppy playing because he couldn't be ****ed to do another take. So why do I keep coming back to his music? I could pontificate and psychoanalyze myself for hours, but that's not really what a review is about now is it? The simplest answer I can give is that when I was a teenager I was a lot like Sam, an insecure, emasculated, loner who wanted nothing more than to sit in his room and make ****ty demos that no one would ever hear. Now that I've grown up a bit I'm no longer that person, but his music still brings me back to that time, and while yeah it wasn't my proudest era of my life it happened to be when I was discovering music of this nature. When I put on a song like "give me back to the sky" I can't help but scream those awful emo lyrics at the top of my lungs everytime, yet I completely dismiss the music as being childish. It's some sort of cognitive dissonance that at some point I'm gonna have to reconcile. So what does all of this have to do with Big Joyous Celebration, the fact that this is the first time I'm even mentioning the album should be a hint... I love this album, but I ****ing hate it. It's The Big Joyous Celebration, Let's Stir The Honeypot is the last studio album by the band Teen Suicide (who are now being called American Pleasure Club, but it's almost an entirely different band anyways; more on that later), released in 2016 it's a pretty landmark album in the "lo-fi" indie/bedroom pop scene. Instead of short songs and a short runtime, we have a collection of 26 tracks clocking in at nearly 70 minutes. No one had really done an album in this style quite like this before Sam (with the exception of Car Seat Headrest and his 2 hour long demo quality albums), I remember initially hearing this and being blown away by consistency of the tracks. The first 3 tracks we're this triple threat knockout with production levels rivaling those of a mainstream band, and while the rest of the album was much more inconsistent in it's production I was mainly blown away by the amount of good tracks. The album quickly went into heavy rotation for me, I was constantly listening to songs like Alex, Just A Pop Song, Pavement, Falling Out of Love With Me, and Just A Pop Song on repeat, I was consumed by the record for a good half of a year. By the end of the year despite having some of the best ****ing albums I've heard to come out EVER (2016 was a wonderful year for music), this Teen ****ing Suicide album was still at 11 for me. I, however, seemed to be in the minority, with most calling it a sprawling mess and even a snoozefest... BAH they just didn't understand the genius of this... right? Well looking back about 2 years later, they we're right. The album starts off ridiculously strong with the 1,2,3 punch of Living Proof to title track to Alex, but after that the quality sort of takes a nosedive. I can attribute this to one thing in particular, the goddamn production. Jesus H the production job on this album is one of the worst I've ever seen in my life. Songs like Obvious Love, V.I.P, Neighborhood Drug Dealer, etc. are plagued with some of the muddiest most frustrating production of all time. His singing is the biggest culprit of this. Completely off key notes, and terrible autotune are all over this thing, which leads me to believe one of three things... either he couldn't be asked to do another take because that's just not cool, he rushed the record out, OR (and this could very easily be it) he was so lazy that he just took a bunch of demos from the last couple years and stapled it together as an album. I fear that it's number 3 mainly because this album is mood deaf. Big Joyous Celebration is a cluster****, to put it nicely. One moment you think you're listening to a professional rock band and the next song could just as easily be a rough piano demo, and then maybe a glitch pop track, and then a professional rock band that just decided not to go to the studio that day, and then some lonely indie folk guys song that for whatever reason made it on the album. I know that was rambling, but it kinda drives home the main problem with this album. IT DOESN'T KNOW WHAT IT WANTS TO BE. This album has the biggest identity crisis I've ever seen, and that just doesn't make for a good listening experience. Now here's the part of the review where I tell you why I love this album. So this thing has some of the best goddamn indie songs ever written. To this day Alex is still amazing, Pavement is still catchy as all hell, It's Just A Pop Song is beautifully layered despite the terrible production, Big Blue Pickup Trunk is so wonky and fun and I could go on and on. Sam has an exquisite musical pallet, his chord progressions are so wonderfully unique and his arrangements are completely their own thing. This single man has written so many indie classics at this point it's hard to even name them all, when he wants to he can play the **** out of a guitar and he can produce up their with the best of them. To me nothing showcases this better than the opening track Living Proof, the arrangement is so lovely and full, the production is colorful, the performance is lively, and the guitar solo legitimately shreds man. This is why Sam pisses me off so much, instead of putting the time and effort to make an entire album like this he ****s out this massive amount of material that just kinda sits there, he didn't DO anything with the songs. If he we're to read this I already know what this response would be... "lmao you're just an idiot", "you're so young haha", "HATER", he's so juvenile when it comes to improving himself and it just becomes frustrating to be a fan of his. He constantly ****s on his fans, he acts like a retard on social media, he makes 0 progress on any of his albums they all retread the same ground, and his music combined with all of this becomes tiresome to listen to. It's why I stopped being a fan, but I'll always love some of his work. It's impossible to navigate.
And that's why It's The Big Joyous Celebration, Let's Stir The Honeypot is one of the most frustratingly lovable albums of all time. I give this album a 5/10, but this isn't an indifferent 5/10, it's something I just equally love and hate, and I don't think anything can amend that.