Salem

how boring

ok so like ima have to get a little personal but melanie says her bestfriend heard DEATH and started crying but NDJE and Death are so good and NDJE made me revisit and start to work our unresolved feeling from losses in my family like tf
ok so like ima have to get a little personal but melanie says her bestfriend heard DEATH and started crying but NDJE and Death are so good and NDJE made me revisit and start to work our unresolved feeling from losses in my family like tf

The mixing is fine i don’t know what some of you are talking about. The issues are the production is just run of the mill and the writing is poor overall while the vocoder isn’t helping her declined vocal skills 

I will be fair though and say maybe she does still sound great and is just using a new technique to cope with the voice change but you can’t hear it if that’s the case on record
 
Maybe she likes the way it sounds though and if she’s happy with it kudos 

Still sad I can’t stream Garden and Dragons Blood in high quality and reworked production … we were soooo robbed! 

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cq9inxkM8o2/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
 
Everyone's merch is just coming fucked up, I guess. I'm well aware that this album wasn't created on the highest budget, but these immediate and numerous quality control issues are ridiculous. Like, was all of this stuff produced on one of those cheap ass "make your own CDs and print your own T-shirts" websites?

I’m sorry but even those rough demos recorded for Portals sound better than this crap. You all probably know the reason why 
 
We need to lock her in a studio with K&OL until she learns her lesson for scrapping mostly everything she’s worked on with them because this isn’t working for me unfortunately. I want to obsess over this album like I did with Cry Baby but ofc questionable choices like these always ruin music for me. We’re in 2023 ffs, there’s no excuse for certain songs to sound like that 

I just really hope she pays attention to how her music sounds next time around and actually LISTENS to the feedback she’s getting. She’s always been a control freak, and ofc everyone who works with her actively support that, so idfk. I just want her music to sound the best it can at this point.. 
 
Sorry for the little rant, that’s exactly how I’ve been feeling this past week. Still love her as an artist tho! 

Please share if you do. Portals as a whole has some odd mixing moments, but it's so painfully apparent on the Evil verses. I've tried to get over it, but when her previous work has felt so immersive, it's a hard pill to swallow to end up with this muffled jumble. I adore the album as a whole, but I hate that half the songs sound like she has a retainer in her mouth.
 
I'm at the point where I'd legit pay someone to perform a decent remaster of the album. Probably wildly illegal, but... 

She’s clearly up CJ’s ass and will likely produce her next album with him in 2030 or whenever it comes out. I think he brings out a better sounding production overall than Michael Keenan did but the mixing is way worse. It kinda blows my mind that she was so excited about working on all this music with K&OL to just throw them out to pasture like she did to rework songs with CJ. I dunno how a group of people listen to songs like the final version of EVIL and think it sounds good like that and to use that for the album? I’d guess it uses the same ‘low pass filter’ (as he called it) that is in the Amulet rap (which sounds appropriate for the rap), but should have opened up when it went into EVIL.

Any of the leaks would have fit the theme much better than Powder and Pluto, they both sound very out of place sonically and thematically, but I am glad we have both because they are great. We already have the leaks, so I guess it’s a win? I dunno. I would have picked N&T and Garden for the Deluxe tracks personally. 

I love Sirens and it’s a career highlight, but for me it’s not one that I can repeat and repeat and repeat, just sort of a loud jarring song. I love it a lot but I would have taken those two over this one. I wonder why she limits herself to 3 deluxe tracks anyway when there’s so much material (same for CB but that was her debut album).

Here’s 10 reasons why Garden should have made it into the album:
 
1. It would be the track that the album cover would be based on. It’s literally a garden portal. 
2. “When you aren’t around I sink into the ground.” - Death
3. “Honeysuckle and Fresh Meat” - Tunnel Vision
4. “Mushrooms Everywhere I’m Turning” - Faerie Soiree
5. “Covered in muck from the earth (Garden) and the sea (Sirens)” - Venus
6. “You cleansed me like a waterfall” - Light Shower in response to “hey where’d the water go?” 
7. The entire song Spider Web is meant to go into Garden. Garden is suppose to be between leeches and Spider Web.
8. “They flocked to my garden” - Leeches
9. The seeds have been sprouting” - Pluto
10. “Dug out a hole, and sow, that’s where your body goes” - Garden connects well with Death.
 
In conclusion, Garden connects in theme and lyrics to over half the album and deserved to be included. 
 
While The Contortionist and Powder don’t connect thematically at all to any of the album (Though both of those songs are AMAZING). 

Yea.. I still think the mixing on this album is really off. It’s definitely apparent while listening to the vinyl, her vocals are kind of all over the place in volume?

Also the “look at the mess I’ve done” lyric in Void reminds me a lot of the “look at the mess you’ve done” in WDBCF, but I could be reaching  

milk of the siren kinda her best song ever

He's a HUGE country star who's album blocked Melanie's from #1 (he also blocked Miley and Lana). If Melanie released a month earlier she would have gotten #1. He's also racist and a MAGA, got exposed for yelling racial slurs while drunk. 

Right? It’s giving abcdefu melody vibes

nymphology chorus sounds so much like a gayle one 

I still wonder who told her these lyrics were a good idea
 
push your p**** into your mouth choke on your doubt’
’baby boy you know i’m on my period yah’
‘how stupid selfish baby’
‘caught you like a cold or flu’
Baby
I'm spinnin’ 'round the corner
It's tasting kinda lonely
And my mind wants to control me
E-e-e-empty
There’s rotten things left in me
Injected by society
 

Does anyone know if all the CDs for this era are low quality, or only the listening party exclusive? I know someone on this thread also mentioned their vinyl sounded odd. I'm not sure what's going on with the manufacturing this era... 

Her little alien persona is really cute but I hope she doesn't keep up with this "thank you so much, human followers! Earthlings, I love you all so much!" shtick too long.
 
Like, I know it's a petty criticism and all, but it just makes her come across as even more of an "I took psychedelics and now I think I'm on a higher plane of being" person than she already is, lol.

That’s not what I meant, I’m just saying she didn’t completely scrap the crybaby side for this album- my problems with the album are completely diff- it’s poorly written and executed by its sound to me

delusional people on twitter are really saying powder is better than sirens after months and months of begging… lowkey makes me wish she didn’t release it 

I'm fairly certain Melanie had a strong concept for the maze/labyrinth imagery since 2020 at latest.
 
As we've established, Maze was written and recorded during After School sessions, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was also an early idea for Portals; like Light Shower and Womb. And of course we can't forget the two Labyrinth songs produced by One Love in 2020 and 2021. None of those three made it to Portals, but Spider Web does have the lyric "Better off dead than stuck in a maze"— so the concept didn't completely die.
 
She was also singing about synchronicities dating back to 2019, but surprisingly we didn't get any mentions of that on the final album.