SEVEN albums I changed my opinions on...
...and SEVEN new ratings for each
They say opinions are like assholes, that everyone has them. I prefer to think of opinions as bodies in general, if I’m being honest. They grow, become more complex, and, most importantly, they change. And thus, as critics, we are faced with one of the most difficult challenges and conundrums: how do we review an album knowing that our opinion might change as we change alongside it? This is especially true as the general consensus of an album changes. Do we change our opinion and be labeled as fickle? Do we remain resolute and be called stubborn or wrong? Do we take a shot every time I use the word “change”? Probably not, or you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning otherwise.
Anyways, in my case, I am more than happy to admit fault and bias and change of opinion. We’ve covered SEVEN times the critics changed their minds overall. But this time? We’re getting self-indulgent up in this list, because we’re rounding up SEVEN albums that I changed my opinions on. I’ll do my best to explain what changed for me, as well as my former and current rankings for each album. Feel free to yell at me about whichever ranking I’m terribly wrong about. Let’s do it!
The Beatles — Let It Be (1970)
The final LP from the legendary Fab Four is a… complicated affair, to say the least. Released after the band had officially broken up, Let It Be was supposed to be an album that would revitalize the Beatles’ camaraderie. Instead, the album, for the longest time, remained a monument to one of the supposedly most turbulent recordings in music, a legend immortalized in the documentary of the same name. And for the longest time, I heard that. The songs felt simpler, but more barren as a result, not helped by the fact that young me was raised on the premier examples of Beatles maximalism like Sgt. Pepper’s and Revolver. I considered it the worst of their output by a country mile.
So, what changed? A few things. One was the release of the Get Back documentary, which put a lot of the album’s recording process into new light. The second, in conjunction with those negative assumptions being stripped away, was that I just began to grow sick of maximalism. Young me was always looking for the next mind-blowing thing, but too much of one thing gets old after a while. As I relistened to the album, I began to appreciate the simpler compositions beyond the obvious big singles. What once felt like annoying studio chatter became a simple joy, a reminder of what the band were trying to accomplish. And I found it far easier to get behind the four chords and the truth approach, from the acoustic softness of “Two of Us” to the rollicking “One After 909”.
While still nowhere near my favorite Beatles album, or even a top 5 for me, I have far more respect for what Let It Be represented and achieved. It’s a respectable swan song for one of the greatest rock bands of all time.
My original rating: 6/10
My current rating: 7.5/10
The Beatles — The White Album (1968)
So, when I said I was growing tired of maximalism? Yeah, this album is the apex of that. At one point in time, I thought of The Beatles (or, as everyone else calls it, The White Album) as one of the best examples of the Fab Four’s creativity and forward thinking. I was obsessed, I would spin it constantly on my CD player as a kid, and then constantly again on my iPod and phone later down the line. They were some of the songs I used to teach myself chords on the guitar.
And then, years later, I kinda realized something: I had never listened to the album in full. Really I had only listened to the big tracks, like “Back In the U.S.S.R.”, “Birthday”, and “Helter Skelter”. So I went and listened to the whole two discs without skipping a single song. Oh my lord, was it ever a different experience. See, the thing about The White Album is that these big tracks are spread out over two discs and an hour and a half of music in total. An hour and a half of the most disconnected music The Beatles had ever released, since The White Album was basically recorded less as a band and more of The Beatles as individual acts contributing songs to the project, and you feel that heavily. This is a meandering album, with so much of the big tracks being broken up by filler that ranges from goofy to downright odd and weird (looking right at you, “Wild Honey Pie”). The band throws everything at the wall, and very little of it sticks as well as it should have. I’m more likely to keep the highlights to my playlist these days.
My original rating: 8.5/10
My current rating: 6.5/10
Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)
Oftentimes, a classic album’s reputation precedes it to an unhealthy extent. Albums that are often regarded as genre-defining or classic have a perilous line to walk between holding up and aging poorly. And, if you’re Radiohead, you have even more expectations working against you in that regard. OK Computer is often name-checked as one of the greatest albums of all time, which is high praise already, let alone the fact that it has consistently maintained high acclaim decades after its original release.
And I… never really got it. Don’t get me wrong, I was taken by the opening riffs of “Airbag”, and “Climbing Up the Walls” is legitimately one of the creepiest songs I’d ever heard, but something about the album as a whole wasn’t clicking 100% with me. It was good, but I didn’t understand why this was so often hailed as one of the greatest albums ever released. What was it about this album that had people so spellbound? For the longest time, I kept my pretentious hat on, believing that the album had spawned so many imitators in its wake that improved on the formula.
What ended up changing would be the state of mind I was in when listening to this album. Earlier this year, after going through an incredibly rough patch, I turned the album on again, listened closer to the lyrics, and… something changed. I now believe that, the more angsty your life has become, the more sense this album makes. And that might sound flippant or sarcastic, but I honestly genuinely mean it. OK Computer’s magic lies in how blatantly it tackles isolation, depression, and alienation thanks to the onset of technology. At the time, it was a revolutionary concept, but it’s become even more resonant in the modern day, and when you yourself feel those emotions, it strikes a chord in you. “Let Down” hits so different these days compared to when I first listened to it. I still don’t necessarily consider it a 10/10, but I am so much more keen on it now that I understand its themes and concept more intimately.
My original rating: 7/10
My current rating: 9/10
Invent Animate - Heavener (2023)
In some cases, the backlash of hype hits immediately rather than decades after the fact. I had stumbled onto Invent Animate thanks to their incredible release, The Sun Sleeps, As If It Never Was, and was so intensely hyped for their follow-up full-length, Heavener. And then… something about it didn’t hit for me. The music was effective and well-played, but it all felt like it was fading together, blending into one another. There was this dreamlike atmosphere about the album that caused me to legitimately start zoning out, and even when I focused and tried to listen, I had a hard time picking out the variations between songs outside of a couple notable ones.
As with a lot of the albums that my opinion has improved on, I found a lot more to enjoy once I started to read the lyrics, after giving the album a break for a year-ish. I still maintain that Invent Animate kept a very consistent sonic profile on this album, almost to the point of monotony, but it was a bit easier to pick out some minute differences from track to track, helped in no small part thanks to the absurd vocal performance from Marcus Vik (that chorus in “Shade Astray” is just perfect). It also helped that I listened to Sun Sleeps almost directly before my relisten, helping me to better understand where this album built off that single’s release and sound, as well as understanding the continued themes of grief and loss that pervade both works. It now stands as one of my favorite metalcore albums of the past few years, and if IA can continue their streak (which their new single proves that they absolutely can), then I think their next album will blow everything beforehand out of the water.
My original rating: 7/10
My current rating 9.5/10
Silent Planet - SUPERBLOOM (2023)
Let’s make one thing very, very clear: I am a Silent Planet fanboy until the day that I die. These guys are masters of their craft when it comes to writing emotionally resonant, oftentimes devastating progressive metalcore. When the leadup to their newest album, SUPERBLOOM, began, I had already devoured all of Iridescent, and the album’s incoming release sent me on a deep dive of their discography. To say the least, I had Silent Planet fever when I turned on SUPERBLOOM, and I immediately felt the electronic DNA of Iridescent buried deep in the bones of this release, combined with some of the most pummeling riff-work of their career (good fucking god, “Annunaki” and “Nexus”). I was obsessed, I couldn’t get enough of it.
And then I returned a little while later to recheck it, and my opinions changed ever so slightly. This album is still incredibly solid in my opinion (again, fanboy), but there’s a few criticisms that stick out to me more. Firstly, you feel the absence of Thomas Freckleton. Not that Garret Russell doesn’t do a great job with the cleans, but one of the best parts of previous Silent Planet releases were Freckleton’s smooth cleans juxtaposed with Russell’s roaring screams. I can’t help but wonder how songs like “Dreamwalker” would’ve sounded if Freckleton was still with the band. Secondly, the album’s lyrics aren’t necessarily as good as what came before. There’s certainly a lot of incredible personal stake here (“Antimatter” in particular being based on a harrowing crash the band sustained in Wyoming), but I feel like the more sci-fi focus almost takes away from some of the tracks here. Not to diss experimentation, but with time, the album has grown off me a little compared to Everything Was Sound or Iridescent, which still get routine full plays from me. (Still one of my favorite album covers though)
My original rating: 9.5/10
My current rating: 8/10
ERRA - Cure (2024)
This one took a little longer to grow off me compared to SUPERBLOOM. ERRA’s newest (at the time) album was marked by an absurd amount of hype, coming off the back of their landmark self-titled album. What we got was a hard left turn involving Meshuggah-inspired djent rhythms and industrial soundscapes, still recognizably ERRA, but different enough from their self-titled that a lot of fans raised eyebrows. I, personally, never saw the hate that this album got in some corners. In some ways, I still don’t understand it. But, at the time, I fell in complete and utter love with this album, appreciating the different choices made, still loving Jesse Cash’s lyrics, adoring the more melodic approach to songs like “Blue Reverie”.
Does it even need to be said that my opinion changed here? As the recency bias slowly wore off, the monotony set in, “Pale Iris” stuck out like a sore thumb because of how self-titled it sounded, the lack of Jesse’s weaving patterns on the fretboard became more and more noticeable. There’s still a lot to like about this album, in my opinion, from barn-busters like “Slow Sour Bleed” to the more accessible tunes such as “Past Life Persona”, but a large chunk of this album has suffered with time, even more so now that silence outlives the earth has shown what ERRA can do when they take the sound of Cure and merge it with their self-titled’s sound.
My original rating: 9/10
My current rating: 8/10
Deafheaven - Sunbather (2013)
And we end on one of the weirder entries here. Not because of its sound, but because this is definitely an album where my opinion has changed… I’m just not sure how yet. To clarify further, black metal and I have had an… odd relationship, and not always the most stable one. I have tried to get into this genre time and time again, from pure black metal to punkish black metal to symphonic to the blackgaze realm that this famous album occupies. I have always had mixed success at best. Most of the time, it’s the vocals, which have never really managed to click with me. I can recognize that the music itself is good… but man, it was never going to get a high ranking from me. However, Deafheaven in particular ended up catching my attention in a completely different way. Once their newest release, Lonely People with Power began blowing up, I checked it out… and really, really enjoyed it!
Naturally, I expected this meant that I would be ready to return to Sunbather, give this landmark album a new shot, and… I definitely don’t outright hate it like I once did, but I’m not sure if I love it either? There’s inherent beauty in a lot of the passages here, but the distinction between the shoegaze and black metal elements are so sudden as to be completely jarring. “Dream House”, I understand the hype for, but then I keep listening and something in me just wonders if I’m still missing something, some new angle that lets me see what everyone else is seeing. I just feel like Lonely People merged the gaze and black metal elements into a damn-near perfect harmony. So, for now, the jury is still out on this one, and I’ll keep smashing my head against this wall of fuzzed out noise until I can find some definitive answer.
My original rating: 5/10
My current rating: Hell if I know/10