I just have to get this off my chest.
Over the past few years I dropped out of the habit of following contemporary music thoroughly, partly due to being otherwise busy (kids etc) and partly due to being on a retro rampage in the late 70s and early 80s. Over the past few months however I've tried to pick it up, making a concerted effort to check out things that seemed worthwhile on the basis of various "best of the year" lists, reviews on Quietus and elsewhere and also recommendations encountered on this site. Partly by buying records, partly by means of Myspace.
After making the attempt with maybe 40-50 different acts, I must admit I find most of it vapidly samey, bereft of any apparent artistic ambition and just very, very tame. The expression "landfill indie" may already be a cliche, but now at least I know how it came to be so widely used that it became one. The various folk/pop acts seem largely content to remain whimsically competent, forgetting perhaps that obvious idols Belle and Sebastian amounted to something not by sounding jangly, but by writing very powerful tunes with sharp melodic qualities, which now seems to have been replaced by a preference for Jeff Buckleyish non-melodies without the artfulness (as well as yammering Buckley/Yorke-style vocals). Electronica seems to be on a self-reference trip, with the most acclaimed acts being praised for their ability to raid the larders of Detroit and marry it to the spirit of Ibiza, or whatever.
To be sure, there were things I liked, more or less. The Horrors, The Maccabees, the Leisure Society, Trashcan Sinatras, TV on the Radio, Soulsavers, Six Organs of Admittance. But none of them are exactly earth-shattering. As John Peel put it in the late eighties concerning the music of that period, "I don't even like the records I like" - surely the best of the crop ought to be better than this. About The Maccabees for example, I'd say their best work reminds me of Whipping Boy and their second-best reminds me of Big Country. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for future inclusion into the pantheon of Bands Who Will Never Be Forgotten. The Horrors? Ranging from Gary Numan meets My Bloody Valentine to what frankly amounts to reinventing The Mission, with better production. But at least these bands achieve some sort of distinctive and recognisable character, unlike most of the rest - Deerhunter, Glasvegas, Fanfarlo, Nadja, One More Grain, Beach House and others. By the time I'd gotten to the third track of Nudge's Myspace offering, I frankly found myself wondering whether there was any good conceivable reason for this music to even exist. Simon Bookish - described in the Quietus review as eccentric pop and the antidote to landfill indie. Sounded completely unremarkable and ordinary in every way to me. Not actually bad, just entirely unremarkable. If that's eccentric, what the F happened while I was napping?
I don't know, most of these acts sound to me like they're content to reference their extensive record collections. You can be a really worthwhile band without any particularly distinctive signature, but that requires songwriting of exceptional quality, which I found nowhere in evidence. Beyond that, I find it's always been down to succeeding in developing some sort of distinctive character - if not downright originality, which after all is rare and difficult after 50 years of rock music, then at least a new and fresh take on familiar elements. And the ability to use your music to create something that corresponds to some sort of artistic, or personal, or political vision, something that couldn't just as well have been done by 25 other bands. Something that shows you've understood that the important thing to take with you from two decades of listening to My Bloody Valentine isn't that charming combination of jangliness and wall of sound that you'd quite like to reproduce, but the courage and ambition to create something that wasn't there before and which could not have been done in quite that way by anybody else than you. Anything else is to treat music as something less than art, which is to take yourself too seriously and what you're doing not seriously enough.
cheers
Over the past few years I dropped out of the habit of following contemporary music thoroughly, partly due to being otherwise busy (kids etc) and partly due to being on a retro rampage in the late 70s and early 80s. Over the past few months however I've tried to pick it up, making a concerted effort to check out things that seemed worthwhile on the basis of various "best of the year" lists, reviews on Quietus and elsewhere and also recommendations encountered on this site. Partly by buying records, partly by means of Myspace.
After making the attempt with maybe 40-50 different acts, I must admit I find most of it vapidly samey, bereft of any apparent artistic ambition and just very, very tame. The expression "landfill indie" may already be a cliche, but now at least I know how it came to be so widely used that it became one. The various folk/pop acts seem largely content to remain whimsically competent, forgetting perhaps that obvious idols Belle and Sebastian amounted to something not by sounding jangly, but by writing very powerful tunes with sharp melodic qualities, which now seems to have been replaced by a preference for Jeff Buckleyish non-melodies without the artfulness (as well as yammering Buckley/Yorke-style vocals). Electronica seems to be on a self-reference trip, with the most acclaimed acts being praised for their ability to raid the larders of Detroit and marry it to the spirit of Ibiza, or whatever.
To be sure, there were things I liked, more or less. The Horrors, The Maccabees, the Leisure Society, Trashcan Sinatras, TV on the Radio, Soulsavers, Six Organs of Admittance. But none of them are exactly earth-shattering. As John Peel put it in the late eighties concerning the music of that period, "I don't even like the records I like" - surely the best of the crop ought to be better than this. About The Maccabees for example, I'd say their best work reminds me of Whipping Boy and their second-best reminds me of Big Country. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for future inclusion into the pantheon of Bands Who Will Never Be Forgotten. The Horrors? Ranging from Gary Numan meets My Bloody Valentine to what frankly amounts to reinventing The Mission, with better production. But at least these bands achieve some sort of distinctive and recognisable character, unlike most of the rest - Deerhunter, Glasvegas, Fanfarlo, Nadja, One More Grain, Beach House and others. By the time I'd gotten to the third track of Nudge's Myspace offering, I frankly found myself wondering whether there was any good conceivable reason for this music to even exist. Simon Bookish - described in the Quietus review as eccentric pop and the antidote to landfill indie. Sounded completely unremarkable and ordinary in every way to me. Not actually bad, just entirely unremarkable. If that's eccentric, what the F happened while I was napping?
I don't know, most of these acts sound to me like they're content to reference their extensive record collections. You can be a really worthwhile band without any particularly distinctive signature, but that requires songwriting of exceptional quality, which I found nowhere in evidence. Beyond that, I find it's always been down to succeeding in developing some sort of distinctive character - if not downright originality, which after all is rare and difficult after 50 years of rock music, then at least a new and fresh take on familiar elements. And the ability to use your music to create something that corresponds to some sort of artistic, or personal, or political vision, something that couldn't just as well have been done by 25 other bands. Something that shows you've understood that the important thing to take with you from two decades of listening to My Bloody Valentine isn't that charming combination of jangliness and wall of sound that you'd quite like to reproduce, but the courage and ambition to create something that wasn't there before and which could not have been done in quite that way by anybody else than you. Anything else is to treat music as something less than art, which is to take yourself too seriously and what you're doing not seriously enough.
cheers