![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Listening to a free handout CD I got given at a gig at Imperial's Student Union the other week. The gig where, oh I can't remember the name of the band now but the singer, a squitty little bloke dressed in a leather skirt and leopard print blouse that he really couldn't carry off, spent half the gig ranting about women and how he apologises to all of them for being a man and being a part of the whole class/gender that have made their world a misery, a sort of existential guilt over rape. Being of a size that I'd be able to lift him up with one hand I thought I'd go have a chat with him after the show. In my worldview, rape is mostly to do with power and power isn't necessarily anything to do with gender or physical stature; those rough factors give you a starting point to work from but two physically identical people can find very different places in society and power structures.
Nothing is ever as it seems of course and he turns out to have a great number of issues around the subject himself, knows he has a terribly artificial pose on stage that he doesn't really agree with but can't or doesn't want to open up to what's really happening. Which is fair enough if the aim of the game is entertainment not ripping yourself apart in public but in that case why bother with the false stance, why drum up the lie?
But anyway I came here to rant about shit music, surely! no, but, this is a CD of signed bands, released songs, funded and promoted, a flagship of BMG's rock and alternative stable, and most of it is disturbingly bad. I have heard much of My Morning Jacket of late and they turn out to be a bad case of a good-time pub band who've got above themselves. Those still sentimental about the Commitments soundtrack shouldn't be allowed to make decisions about band-signing. Or if they are, they could least give a shit about vocal ability and refuse to have anything to do with this querulous note-hunting reverb-disguised mediocrity. "Straining and raw (think Embrace’s Danny McNamara impersonating Neil Young), the timbre is perfectly flawed and strikingly distinctive" says Drowned in Sound. Happily, Neil Young associations are dangerous ever since he did a song named 'Piece of Crap.'
I've heard about that there Maroon5 too. And not a single review has yet said 'Terence Trent D'Arby covering Prince songs with never an idea that wasn't out of date fifteen years ago,' and if not, what do music journalists get paid for, since that's all you need to know?
Let us skim over Adema. It's wispy light-weight musically-infantile pop-goth but this sells to the spooky kids so why not, if it makes them money. I still don't get why all the girls go gooey over someone as chinlessly miscast as the bloke out of HIM but they do, so let's not bother trying to take his track on here to bits either.
Electric Soft Parade don't come out badly given the state of some of the other stuff on here - ideal candidates for the argument that people under a certain age shouldn't be allowed to buy Beatles albums but if we set the limit high enough to exclude those likewise sinners Gomez then I wouldn't be allowed to own any. Not that, come to think of it, I do. Hmm.
Silvertide. Doing a song titled Mary Jane. And, do you know, they thought it might be a witty and original idea to pretend to be the Black Crowes and then do a song playing on the ambiguity of the euphemism. 'Scream my name, Mary Jane, you get me fucked up in my brain, you know I just want to fly all night..' I wonder, was it the 1990 Love/Hate song or the 1993 Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill collaboration that gave them the idea or, bless 'em, could they even have thought it up themselves? Allmusic lists 150 songs with that title and almost all of them are after those two dates, apart from an apparent prog spate of them in the late sixties and another by seventies funk bands. It's even been a bloody Sheep On Drugs song. Did we need another band to do it, and so weakly?
Who comes out well? Kings of Leon and Vue have a fine clatter to them, and a poise, especially in the case of the first, that makes them something other than filler. With so much of the rest of this the rhythm marks off chunks of time to be got through, making them an exercise in time-wasting, merely a way to measure three unremarkable minutes off of your life. Kings of Leon remind you that there might be better ways to spend your time, that music can illuminate time not obliterate it. White Light Motorcade are nothing that imaginative but at least have some texture, and Cave In do something that sounds like it ought to be mundane but keeps turning out to worm its way deeper in, to be saying something down where I can't quite see it.
There are compensations, there are good bits, but who the hell really thinks is what music is for? If this is rock and alternative I'm going to go listen to Radio 3.
Nothing is ever as it seems of course and he turns out to have a great number of issues around the subject himself, knows he has a terribly artificial pose on stage that he doesn't really agree with but can't or doesn't want to open up to what's really happening. Which is fair enough if the aim of the game is entertainment not ripping yourself apart in public but in that case why bother with the false stance, why drum up the lie?
But anyway I came here to rant about shit music, surely! no, but, this is a CD of signed bands, released songs, funded and promoted, a flagship of BMG's rock and alternative stable, and most of it is disturbingly bad. I have heard much of My Morning Jacket of late and they turn out to be a bad case of a good-time pub band who've got above themselves. Those still sentimental about the Commitments soundtrack shouldn't be allowed to make decisions about band-signing. Or if they are, they could least give a shit about vocal ability and refuse to have anything to do with this querulous note-hunting reverb-disguised mediocrity. "Straining and raw (think Embrace’s Danny McNamara impersonating Neil Young), the timbre is perfectly flawed and strikingly distinctive" says Drowned in Sound. Happily, Neil Young associations are dangerous ever since he did a song named 'Piece of Crap.'
I've heard about that there Maroon5 too. And not a single review has yet said 'Terence Trent D'Arby covering Prince songs with never an idea that wasn't out of date fifteen years ago,' and if not, what do music journalists get paid for, since that's all you need to know?
Let us skim over Adema. It's wispy light-weight musically-infantile pop-goth but this sells to the spooky kids so why not, if it makes them money. I still don't get why all the girls go gooey over someone as chinlessly miscast as the bloke out of HIM but they do, so let's not bother trying to take his track on here to bits either.
Electric Soft Parade don't come out badly given the state of some of the other stuff on here - ideal candidates for the argument that people under a certain age shouldn't be allowed to buy Beatles albums but if we set the limit high enough to exclude those likewise sinners Gomez then I wouldn't be allowed to own any. Not that, come to think of it, I do. Hmm.
Silvertide. Doing a song titled Mary Jane. And, do you know, they thought it might be a witty and original idea to pretend to be the Black Crowes and then do a song playing on the ambiguity of the euphemism. 'Scream my name, Mary Jane, you get me fucked up in my brain, you know I just want to fly all night..' I wonder, was it the 1990 Love/Hate song or the 1993 Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill collaboration that gave them the idea or, bless 'em, could they even have thought it up themselves? Allmusic lists 150 songs with that title and almost all of them are after those two dates, apart from an apparent prog spate of them in the late sixties and another by seventies funk bands. It's even been a bloody Sheep On Drugs song. Did we need another band to do it, and so weakly?
Who comes out well? Kings of Leon and Vue have a fine clatter to them, and a poise, especially in the case of the first, that makes them something other than filler. With so much of the rest of this the rhythm marks off chunks of time to be got through, making them an exercise in time-wasting, merely a way to measure three unremarkable minutes off of your life. Kings of Leon remind you that there might be better ways to spend your time, that music can illuminate time not obliterate it. White Light Motorcade are nothing that imaginative but at least have some texture, and Cave In do something that sounds like it ought to be mundane but keeps turning out to worm its way deeper in, to be saying something down where I can't quite see it.
There are compensations, there are good bits, but who the hell really thinks is what music is for? If this is rock and alternative I'm going to go listen to Radio 3.