Skip to main content

You Gotta Feel It

If there's one way of recommendation that I don't like, it's the following: "Eric, you've got to hear this!" If there's another, it's recommending a band while name-dropping very defined and well-known bands. As much as I appreciate this person wanting me to hear something, there's something else going on. Being a recovering people-pleaser, I place myself in a difficult position. With the exception of some people who know my musical tastes very well, I have a sense of hesitation with these tactics. I don't mean to be a jerk about this, but let me explain.

A few months ago, while talking to a music critic I greatly admire, he mentioned how much he liked Parts and Labor. At no point in our conversation did he say, "Eric, do you like Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma and the Jesus Lizard? Then you'll love Parts and Labor!" He merely mentioned the band in passing and why he liked them. At no point did he force it upon me to listen to them. The deal was, I was very curious for several reasons. I trust his opinions and we've often agreed about bands in the past. So, I checked out the band's MySpace page soon after. I really liked what I heard and I hope to give them some nice ink in a future issue of Punk Planet.

With all the years of finding music, I have to say this is the preferred method with making me curious. In the case of Parts and Labor, there were no band names dropped as reference points, so I was going into them blindly. I wasn't listening for a Sonic Youth or Mission of Burma comparison because there weren't any made beforehand. The deal is, the way I've seen a lot of new bands be promoted mention established band names and sometimes come with a flimsy tagline (ie, "This is your new favorite band!"). To be honest, I'll say that takes the urgency away immediately.

It's one thing for Matt to strongly advise me to check out Spoon's Soft Effects and Love Ways EPs. It's another thing for a promotions person I don't know send me MP3s, EPKs and photos of new bands I don't know about. The key difference: I've known Matt way longer and know his tastes are very congruent with mine. So, when he tells me to consider Spoon's "I Could See the Dude" for my Spoon mix-CD collection, I happily abide. With the latter example, after listening to scores of heavily-promoted mediocre bands in college, I can't help but have trepidation when I get e-mails from promotional people these days.

I treat 98% of my music listening as a joyous, zero-pressure situation. If I want to hear the Free Design's "You Could Be Born Again" over and over again just because I want to, that's cool. Nobody's telling me what I should think. As nice as it is to get free MP3s and CDs from promotional people, what I really want to listen to always takes precedence. If I want to hear Tom Waits' "Kentucky Ave." for the 798th time right now, then I'm going to do it.

Make no mistake, there's a deeper, personal quandary here. And it's been in place long before I really started digging for music. Do I listen to this band just to satisfy this person's advances? What if I don't like it and can't seem to muster up my honest opinion? Well, the way I like to talk about music is talking about music that positively moves me. Sure, I like to talk about music I dislike, but it takes a lot for me to talk about something I find mediocre.

Now this is not to say that every band that gets written about and freely passed around is mediocre. Far from it. I'm just saying for every find like Death Cab for Cutie, there's a few Blueline Medic's, Fastbreak's and Sinclaire's. The way I see it, I want to find records that impact me now and they don't have be released this year. I may have not understood Small Change ten years ago, but I do now. I wasn't ready to jump into XTC four years ago, but I'm open to it now. But I can dig deep with Sky Blue Sky and Voxtrot right now too. It's different for every situation. I may the miss the boat on new stuff the week it's released, but I don't think I should be faulted. If anything, it's recognizing my hard-headed ways and not feeling bad about having them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Catherine Wheel

Originally posted: Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 Despite managing to release five proper albums, Catherine Wheel was one of those bands that always seemed to slip past the mainstream rock crowd. Yes, they got some nice airplay in their day, but people seem to have forgotten about them. You may hear “Black Metallic” or “Waydown” on a “classic alternative” show on Sirius or XM or maybe even on terrestrial radio, but that’s about it. For me, they were one of most consistent rock bands of the ’90s, meandering through shoegazer, hard rock, space rock and pop rock, all while eluding mainstream pigeonholing. Led by the smooth, warm pipes of vocalist/guitarist Rob Dickinson (cousin of Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson), Catherine Wheel featured Brian Futter on lead guitar, Dave Hawes on bass and Neil Sims on drums. They weren’t a pretty-boy guitar band, but they weren’t a scuzzy bunch of ragamuffins either. Though the band hailed from England, Catherine Wheel found itself more welcome on American air

Hello, Control

I'm still a big fan of iTunes . I haven't tried Napster , Urge or eMusic as I've been perfectly happy with Apple's program ever since I downloaded it two years ago. However, an annoying new feature has come up with its latest version, 7.0. Whenever you pull up your music library, a sidebar taking up 3/4ths of the screen appears plugging the iTunes Music Store. Why is this an annoyance? Well, first and foremost, since you can't close the sidebar, you can't escape it. I believe a music library is a private collection, a spot away from the music store. So what's the need for constant advertisements and plugs? To provide a better visual, let me describe what I see whenever I pull up a song in my iTunes library. When I listen to "This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open" by the Weakerthans, I see a graphic for Left and Leaving , the album that it comes from (and available in the iTunes Music Store), along with a list of the Weakerthans' other albums,

Best of 2021

  Last year, my attention span was not wide enough to listen to a lot of LPs from start to finish. Too much went on in 2020 to focus on 10-15 albums, so I went with only a couple to spotlight. Well, 2021 was a little better, as I have a list of top four records, and a lot of individual tracks.  (I made a lengthy Spotify playlist ) So, without further ado, here’s my list of favorites of the year: Albums Deafheaven, Infinite Granite (listen) Hands down, my favorite album of the year. I was not sure where Deafheaven would go after another record that brought My Bloody Valentine and death metal fans together, but they beautifully rebooted their sound on Infinite Granite. The divisive goblin vocals are vastly pared-down here, as are the blast beats. Sounding more inspired by Slowdive, the band has discovered a new sonic palette that I hope they explore more of in the future. It’s a welcome revelation. I still love their older material, but this has renewed my love of what these guys do.  J