Just wanted to rant on my feelings about the first 2 tracks vs the whole album

Feel free to downvote me but this is how I feel and my opinions are still as valid as anyone else’s. I really want to love this album but it just hasn’t clicked with me and I think I now understand why.

Relistening phantom island for the 6th time but this time in random order and getting to the title track has actually made me sad and disappointed, not at the band but at the fact that we could’ve gotten such a fun and great album. The title track is an orchestral gizz song with delicious horns, heavenly lower brass, and ominous piano. It doesn’t really have any recurring sections really but rather it progresses like an orchestral piece but it’s super well structured and has very great vocals that make it very “gizz”. The orchestral sections are almost entirely made up of orchestra and even the happier upbeat parts are mainly horns, winds, strings and piano. As the piece continues, it mixes both perfectly with them both combing in the climaxing end with frantic strings, heavy piano, but also a dark and heavy guitar solo. The piece throughout it tells the story of phantom island: a plane crashes with optimistic survivors who land on phantom island which eventually leads them into insanity. This is story is not only spoken but it’s also developed through the actual music: having the dark orchestral parts represent the island and the upbeat lighter parts with guitar, higher horns and winds represent the unsuspecting survivors. As the survivors get more insane the two aspects blend more and more together so the song basically develops its themes through motifs. Given the album’s name, you would assume the story summarized in the title track would be fully developed throughout the album and naturally that’s Deadstick goes on to do. It’s a much more rock centric song but that doesn’t mean it’s just a blues song with horns slapped on, the horns and piano build on the song by carrying the main melody of the song and adding much more to the song. The more yacht rock sound also aligns with the story established in the tt and the story of Deadstick which is about the plane crash which was established as the start of the story before the survivors have gone insane (so naturally there would be more upbeat guitars and horns rather than dark orchestral parts). This theme slightly gets developed in the sonically aspects of lonely cosmos with the darker orchestral parts but overall it just feels very different and out of place due to the fact that it seems to jump forward a lot in terms of how much darker it is from Deadstick and the noticeable lack of horns, piano, and most importantly melodies. Without a defined structure and motifs, it sounds very dull and very different than the first 2 tracks. The entire rest of the album follows a very similar theme in which they don’t follow the story established in the first 2 tracks, they don’t develop really any melodic structure resulting in them feeling very samey, and they feel super unfinished, feeling more like rewritten blues songs with orchestra slapped on compared to the first 2 tracks which were actual orchestral pieces. This in out of place guitar, weird sounding vocals, and they are unable to develop the orchestral sound which is also from the fact that they decide to just stop using piano and barely use any more horns, opting for a shit ton of strings and flute (which also contribute to the samey feeling) which they already have in their arsenal with Stu on flute and synth strings. The last 8 tracks feel just like blues songs with strings and which would be okay if it weren’t for the first 2 tracks which show you what could’ve been if they actually developed the orchestra and used it in a meaningful way. Sorry for my rant, it might grow on me but I’m just slightly disappointed, and

TL;DR

First 2 PI tracks are great and develop the orchestra well but the next tracks have noticeable lack of structure and decide to get rid of the piano and most of the horns, resulting in an album that feels very samey and dull (albeit somewhat vibey)