- Austra — Darken Her Horse
- Pale Sketcher — Supple Hope
- My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult — Diamonde Doll
- Chet Faker — Blush
- Lightning Dust — I Knew
- Orangutang — Bigger Chunk
- Author & Punisher — L_r
- Modest Mouse — Satellite Skin
- Datarock — I Used to Dance With My Daddy
- Black Rebel Motorcycle Club — Fault Line
- Serj Tankian — Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition
- Andy McKee — Drifting
- Isle of Q — Bag of Tricks
- Tombs — Deathtripper
- Corrections House — Run Through the Night
- Thao Nguyen — Bag of Hammers
- Spirit Caravan — Dreamwheel
- Aimee Mann — Nothing Is Good Enough
- The Wake — Control
- Bang Tango — Wrap My Wings
music
Looking for the Crest of a New Wave
If you’re 33 or older, you will never listen to new music again—at least, that’s more or less what a new online study says. The study, which is based mainly on data from U.S. Spotify users, concludes that age 33 is when, on average, people stop discovering new music and begin the official march to the grave.
Yes, Lara, are you there? Can you hear me? Yes, OK, great. I’m reporting to you live from somewhere beyond age 33, and I can assure you that there is indeed musical life out here. It’s sparsely populated, perhaps, but not dead. That’s right, all hope is not lost. Granted, a lot of what you’ve heard back there in the studio is true — careers, kids and bills do tend to eat up the energy and money that was formerly devoted to seeking out new music on a whim. Trying to keep up with popular music makes a lot of people feel silly for being out of step with their peers. And, let’s face it, it can be difficult for older listeners to relate to the lyrical fixations of youth culture. So much melodrama, anger and mindless rebellion!
But though time may rob you of some of your affinities, there is no law of entropy preventing you from cultivating new pleasures. Getting older means very few things will surprise you with sheer novelty, but there is still plenty of quality to be found. Take the time, make the effort. Music, to me, has an unparalleled ability to make the same old world feel completely new. It’s what keeps my thoughts from becoming stagnant. This is one instance where I agree with all that stuff about age only being a number — if your mind is still active, and you can still find pure joy in the interplay of melodies and rhythms, you’re not really old.
Everything Fallen Through; I Think I See the End of the Line
Rob Crow says he’s pretty much quitting music, saying it’s “financially irresponsible to [his] family,” as well as “ultimately humiliating to my psyche.” The Pinback and Goblin Cock frontman posted on Facebook that he’s going to try to “finish and release the work” he’s “already spent [his] heart and tears on,” but that “even that is likely to ruin” him.
I was just listening to him today. Shitfuckhelldamn. I hate a world in which Rob Crow can’t earn enough money as a musician to keep doing it.
One Day There Will Be Associated with My Name the Recollection of Something Frightful
“Ooh, baby, I’ll love you better/Wanna be with you night and day…”
Familiar enough to catch my attention, wrong enough to make me focus. That mismatched rhyme scheme… “I think you mean, ‘Baby, I love your way’“, I said. She was skeptical, so off to Google we went. A few seconds later, we were looking at Peter Frampton videos on YouTube. She relented. “Hmpf. Fine, you were right.” As a conciliatory gesture, I admitted that I didn’t know Frampton had done it originally. My first experience of the song was in high school, when some pop band had done a cover of it, with a section from, of all things, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” grafted onto it.
In the pre-Internet days, it would have mercifully ended there. I didn’t remember the band’s name, and it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to find it. But Google’s omnipresent search bar sits right there, beckoning. A portal to things best left unseen and forgotten. And so, by adding “free bird medley” to our original search, we found ourselves face-to-face with it. And now, because we’re all in this together, you’re going to see it too:
Eight seconds in, you’ll notice something awfully incongruous for an ’80s pop video.
I hadn’t given any thought to the band’s name, assuming it was just a cool-sounding phrase they had heard in a deracinated form somewhere else in pop culture. Suddenly, it seemed ominous. Off to Wikipedia, where my suspicions were confirmed: “He chose the name Will to Power for the group as an homage to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of an individual’s fundamental will to power.”
Judging by the mustache he sports in the video, the band’s name wasn’t the only homage.
Nietzsche has been accused of being a formative influence on fascism, postmodernism, conservatism, and who knows how many other -isms, with varying degrees of accuracy. His influence on ’80s soft-rock, though, has hitherto been unacknowledged, a shame too secret for academic historians to face. Frankly, I don’t know how I can defend him against this. I’m going to need time to reconsider his philosophy in light of this new context.
She broke the stunned silence. “I was just trying to be romantic!” I know, my dear. But still…
Somebody Else Calls It the News, But That’s Yesterday’s News
Oooh; what he did there, I see it! 1992, you see, that’s when the Crowes were last culturally relevant, when they last had big hits on the charts. If your songs aren’t in the Top Ten Most Tweeted, why would you even want to go on living?
Oh, A.V. Club. That’s just so…so…you.
I come neither to praise nor bury the Black Crowes. I’m just somewhat perplexed by the way in which “relevance” has become so prominent in arguments over taste (and trust me, dismissing an artist for perceived irrelevance is a constant theme at the A.V. Club, where noting “This artist has unsurprisingly declined in popularity over the years!” is an endless source of amusement), when I would have assumed it to be the commonest of sense that relevance is just another word for “fashionable”, and neither word tells you anything about the integrity or lasting value of art. Mostly, though, I’m just struck by the laziness, if anything, the way in which a writer for a pop-culture geek site with pretensions of critical respectability, when he has nothing else to say yet feels compelled to say it, falls back on the reflexive sneer, the defensive irony. God forbid anyone get the impression that he might be reporting on this little bit of music news in earnest, as if he or anyone else might actually care!
Freddie was right about these people; their recurring nightmare is that one day, the music will stop and they’ll be the ones left standing without a seat, and everyone else will point and laugh uproariously at them, and they’ll look down and see that they’re naked — naked in the sense that everyone can see exactly what cheesy music and films they like and what they only pretend to hate, and as they stand there trembling, wishing for a blanket of jaded detachment to cover up with, they’ll hear someone say the words that cut them to the bone: “Ohmigawd, how completely uncool!” What a sad, perpetually adolescent way to go through life.
Some Seeds Fell Along the Path, and the Birds Came and Devoured Them
Accordingly, Seeds reflects a band unconcerned with challenging its listeners this time and more interested in delivering a complete collection of competent, mark-bearing songs for the sake of proudly stating the existence of TV On The Radio in 2014. This means familiar roles for all members, roles they embrace even if there’s nothing new about them.
…Seeds clearly doesn’t possess the level of obsession invested in TV On The Radio’s two hallmark LPs, Return To Cookie Mountain and Dear Science, and Adebimpe has said as much upfront.
…Each song is singular, simply composed but well finished, harboring few surprises. Any one of them could be the single.
Seeds won’t go down as an essential or even particularly consummate TV On The Radio album, but it could very well fare better than others have on the charts, something that would be an appropriate, perfectly timed reward.
All this backhanded, butt-hurty complimenting in a record review that gives them a “C” grade. Yeah, what a letdown that they merely offered a collection of great songs by anyone’s standards, rather than musically reinventing the wheel in a way that would flatter the cleverness of certain listeners who truly get it, man. Pfft. Motherfucker’s lost his GOT-damn mind, that’s what I say. It’ll be days before I finally stop listening to this record. Favorite release this year, hands down.
Good. Use Your Aggressive Feelings. Let the Hate Flow Through You
Tsk tsk. As is so often the case, arid, abstract principles are ultimately no match for the atavistic joy to be found in communal scorn.
Is There Something Wrong With These Songs? Maybe There’s Something Wrong With the Audience
Reynolds is not the only one to have connected the dearth of innovation in pop with its “disintensification.” In a piece for n+1 reviewing the first fifteen years of the music website Pitchfork, Richard Beck equated the immobility of contemporary independent rock with its decline into an arena of complacent, cultural-capital driven fashions—a judgment that clearly echoes Reynolds’s worries about underground music becoming a form of niche consumerism. Both arguments seem to interpret the lack of artistic evolution as a sign of impotence, specifically pop’s powerlessness to effect change on the social or political level. The belief that music could invade—and remake—all things public and private is part of the primordial myth of rock. Since at least the Sixties, new art held out the promise of a new life, and reinvention on the personal level could be revolution on the social.
…From this angle, what retromania heralds isn’t the death of pop as an area of creativity, but the demise of a certain type of (political) possibility. Genres of music that were once outlets for waves of discontented energy have been subdued and subsumed into the consumerist hegemony—rock, punk, hip-hop and the rest turned into competing leisure options rather than activities with any subversive potential. In the absence of new styles to take their place, pop petrifies as a social force.
There are too many excellent parts to excerpt them all. Through the lens of popular music, Jeffery addresses the same theme I was just talking about in a political context: what sort of cultural imagination do we have anymore? Does anyone believe in teleological progression, in radical change, or was that just the result of a peculiar, narrow window in human history that has now begun to dim and close? Popular music, like culture itself, seems content to just tweak what already exists, unable to imagine any shocking innovations. The thought of such cyclical stasis is unsettling to us, having already accustomed ourselves to the post-Enlightenment sense of being the masters of our own destiny, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the case.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
The main thing should be whether the performer or artist is bringing pleasure to someone’s life. If that pleasure is not harming anyone, it is bigoted and arrogant to mock that individual for enjoying it. We’re not the deciders of what is “real” or “proper” music, art, film, and so on. Shaming should cease so we can all listen and enjoy whatever we like – while recognising we are all capable of enjoying more and enjoying things in new ways. We just don’t have to.
Of course I agree that musical taste, like almost any other type of taste, is a poor signifier of the sort of personal qualities that matter. A shrill, desperate apophenia imposed upon the sound and fury of insignificance, I believe I said once. Why, I even proclaimed rhythm and melody to be empty of moral significance as well. “Do what the fuck you like!“, as Ozzy Osbourne loudly encouraged us from the stage at the inaugural Ozzfest. To the casual viewer, he may have been urging us to spring from our seats and go apeshit for three-fourths of the original Black Sabbath, but I’m pretty sure he was also, on another level, making a subtle commentary on the facile divide between the supposed gravitas of certain art forms and the causal effects they supposedly engender in the listener/viewer. In fact, if I may be permitted a bit more leeway to interpret, I believe he was reminding us that you can surround yourself with signifiers of profundity like classical music and modernist literature yet still be a dolt, while the feel-good factor of listening to ear candy might help facilitate a breakthrough in your thinking or writing.
But part of the problem is with the utilitarian perspective on what constitutes the boundaries and defining character of pleasure. I’m sure most people would agree that those who listen to Nickelback are enjoying pleasure in that moment, pleasure which doesn’t hurt anyone. The subsequent judgment and argument hinges on what that supposedly entails, though. The Nickelbackian subject doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He (and I assume this is one of those cases in which the generic male pronoun will not only be acceptable, but positively insisted upon) is embedded in an existing culture. He is an actor in the world. And how does he act? Well, there’s where all the fun begins, as the artistic license to connect dots which may or may not exist is limited only by one’s imagination. If we were to poll any number of music/pop-culture sites for their portrayals of the typical rawk fan, I think we could feel safe in expecting a common image to coalesce: one of an aggressive, beer-swilling, womanizing dudebro. Sure, maybe he’s doing no harm as he drums on his steering wheel and hollers along with the lyrics to “Something In Your Mouth“, but what’s he thinking about as he does it, huh? And how is he going to behave later on at the club as a result? Can we trust people like him to draw the correct conclusions without supervision? This is the stuff of which a million A.V. Club flamewars are made.
In fact, Tauriq is doing a little question-begging here (in the proper sense of the term, not the bastardized popular-usage sense). He takes it as a given that pop music is value-neutral, just a harmless collection of melodies, rhythms, fluffy lyrics and fashion trends, and thus wonders why people can’t just get along and live and let live. Because the issue of pop music’s supposed value-neutrality is precisely the point of contention here, that’s why. Ferzample: let’s say I announce myself as a fan of Skrewdriver and Prussian Blue. You would rightly claim that that says something extremely significant about me. Now, you might argue that groups like those are more overt propaganda than art or entertainment. Still, the point is to establish the principle that somewhere between them and Justin Bieber, there’s a vague line demarcating political significance from personal preference. People simply don’t agree where that line should be drawn. You’re not going to convince them to stop arguing by talking as if the line doesn’t exist.
Even if you accept that Nickelback is just a generic rawk band and not really worth the energy it takes to hate them, well, you have to consider that pop-culture snobbery is a tributary feeding into deeper-running rivers that have existed for quite a while. Romanticism gave us the ideal of violently passionate thrill-seeking, living on the edge, sacrificing one’s health, sanity and life itself for artistic purity and innovation, which by definition entailed utter scorn for the safe, predictable, traditional and typical. Then you have the politicized critiques of elite leftist intellectuals over the last century or so, where pop culture was either seen as a narcotic, keeping the masses stupefied and unable to heed the true calling of radical emancipatory politics, or an mindless expression of the moronic, conformist status quo, which was naturally conservative if not reactionary. To many people, “harmless entertainment” is highly suspect itself.
Moreover, as Freddie says, you have to keep in mind how much of this is an Internet phenomenon, where the mostly-text-based environment means that people have to explicitly spell out their character in the absence of the nonverbal cues we normally use. Using words, it’s not easy to describe your essential sense of self in a way that you will feel does you justice. It’s very easy to present a top-ten list of your likes and dislikes, though, and to use those as vehicles for concepts they were never designed to carry. I have no idea how to give you a written facsimile of what it is to know me in the context of daily life. I do know how to clearly tell you that I hate the fuck out of that goddamned band, you know, the one with that awful song, and man, what kind of asshole would actually choose to listen to that?
And thus it’s only a couple short steps to arguing that it’s your moral duty to shame people out of liking entertainment that will supposedly set them on the path to a lifetime of abusive relationships, or condemning a singer’s moral character based on confirmation bias psychoanalysis of a few quotes and lyrics. Granted, Marcotte’s idiocy is legendary and more tenacious than that of your average Internet pop-culture snob, but the sentiment is common. Some of the people Tauriq is talking about are simply being mean for the fun of it, but the true believers are certain that they can see the structural elements behind supposedly innocuous differences in taste, the broad, underlying patterns which determine the particular, individual scenario down to the details. What do tolerance and politeness matter when there are souls to save?
Ideology aside, there’s also the basic fact that, for social animals, there is no clear distinction between individual and group identity. The individual is mostly a legal fiction (one I approve of!), whereas the imperative to maintain group cohesion is deeply ingrained. Sociopolitical hygiene requires constant monitoring for outbreaks of idiosyncratic behavior which could be threatening to the group’s stability. Pace Sly and the Family Stone, it makes all the difference in the world for everyday people which group you’re in. I suppose it’s possible you may convince people that music is an empty signifier, that judging people for their taste is like an autoimmune disorder — an overreaction to harmless allergens. But there will always be something else to replace it. I mean, I’m down with Tauriq’s message, but I’m a misanthropic hermit; you’re not going to build a functioning society around people like me.
Signal Fade
FdB:
But for all that there is another, more honest way in which old-school blogging has become actually egalitarian, grimy and uncool in the way real egalitarianism is. I like blogging now because whatever vestigial coolness it once had was gone. So now it really is what it was once sold as: just a repository of words. And there is a real, quiet, unsexy kind of egalitarianism in just words, a very basic fairness that doesn’t function as a social mechanism even in an online space where everything is some message about who you’re with. I’ve written a few times for Medium, and somebody said to me, conspiratorially, at a party, “You know, Medium’s very uncool.” And I just had no idea! God, the freedom! Joy for me is living outside of signalling.
Likewise, until this morning, I had absolutely no idea that Line 6 amps were regarded as “the butt of gear jokes” by people who care about such things. But one commenter assures us that they are “one of THE most hated amps amongst the respected audiophile and musician community.” Not just any audiophile and musician community; the respected one!
The last guy I worked on music with introduced me to Line 6 equipment. He worked as a manager of a music store, so he got to experiment with anything he wanted, and that was what he favored. I was instantly sold on their guitar pod, and being just a simple fellow who knows what he likes, I never saw any reason to keep up with the latest gear after that. Like so many good Germans, though, I was apparently allowing my blissful ignorance to provide cover for heinous crimes against audio.
As for blogging, barely a week has gone by over the last several years without seeing another epitaph for it. Even that pose has gotten old, though, so now we learn that the real “fascinating and challenging” writing is happening on a bunch of platforms I hadn’t even heard of, with the Ouroboros apparently ready to start devouring Twitter now. Ah, well, I suppose being fashionable is its own punishment — what more could you wish on people like that than to be perpetually dissatisfied, always afraid of missing out or being left behind? Me, I’m content being a Brian Wilson “In My Room” sort of man-child, spending my time on the fringe, shielded by others’ dismissive contempt.
Stealing Back Mystery
Tom Valcanis interviewing a Nameless Ghoul:
When you guys are out on stage doing your black ritual thing, we could imagine Steve Buscemi under those cloaks if we so desired. But is that the point? The man underneath makes no difference?
We’d like to think so. [pauses for thought] We know that there are a lot of things that we set out early on for this band. Now, five years later, these goals feel very naive and unrealistic. We never considered the concept of Ghost. It’s kind of paradoxical when we’re trying to be a successful band and trying to remain anonymous. The idea was to have the experience be as intense as possible for people watching. The anonymity thing was just a bonus.
Black metal for instance has a discount store theatre to it, with costumes and stage names and what have you. You guys take the Alice Cooper shocking-apron-wearing-mothers-into-fainting thing beyond the limit. Where does the theatre come from in your musical upbringing?
Ghost derives from a very fanboy point of view. It’s a combination of all those big dinosaur rock phenomenons. It comes from a profound fascination with underground death and black metal. Thrash metal, too. The darker elements of Ghost comes from the early ‘90s black metal scene. We picked up a lot of those aesthetics. I was brought up in that underground. The clandestine aspect comes from bands like Mayhem or Sarcophago or say, Devil Doll.
Is that what Ghost is all about? Stealing back mystery from the Internet?
I think so. All of those pre-internet elements coloured a lot of my thinking. Back then you couldn’t find anything about these bands. You may have seen four pictures of them. You knew very little about them. That experience and that background is how I want people to regard Ghost. We don’t want Ghost to be obvious.
I love that about them, the theatricality and the mysteriousness (and it’s always heartening to see artists who scorn the idea of compulsive attention-seeking and living on permanent display). I only wish their music didn’t seem merely average to me. Maybe they’ll grow on me if I try hard enough.
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Rhymes
But you get what he’s saying: Hip-hop has traditionally been an unfriendly place to gay people. “Same Love” was released in 2012, but it didn’t break till this year, after Macklemore and Ryan Lewis scored their career-delivering hits, “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us.” Had it been written later, it very well could have been different. It’s been a watershed year in terms of hip-hop’s relationship to homosexuality. It’s harder and harder to make the case that “hip-hop hates me.”
Finally. It’s about damned time. Away with the fear. Down with the shame. An end to the living of a double life, worried about what would happen if the neighbors or one’s social circle were to find out. No more channeling that self-loathing into venomous aggression toward those who are brave enough to be out and proud. No more need to bear the insulting jokes, the insensitive questions, the utter indignity of having to pretend that Frank Ocean is a talented artist when all you care about is his political significance. Stop tangling yourselves up in painful knots of self-doubt and guilt! Say it loud, and say it proud: “We’re white progressives, and we love hip-hop and rap!” There’s nothing to be ashamed of anymore!
Oh, yeah, and I’m sure gay people will see this as a positive thing too.
When Your World Stopped
“It’s boring almost beyond belief,” British rock critic Nik Cohn wrote of the Beatles’ self-titled album shortly after it came out in November of 1968. Cohn’s brickbat was just one of two negative reviews the New York Times published upon the release of The Beatles. (You probably know it better as the White Album.) Those responses, though, may say less about the record’s virtues than the way it upended listeners’ expectations. On 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Fab Four polished its pop instincts. The Beatles, by contrast, was scruffy and centerless, its thirty songs encompassing mock-Beach Boys vocal harmonies (“Back in the U.S.S.R.”), psychedelic folk (“Wild Honey Pie”), proto-punk (“Helter Skelter”), sound collage (“Revolution 9”), and plenty more besides.
“Everybody’s going to find something to love and hate on it,” says Indiana University music professor Glenn Gass, who has taught a course on the Beatles since 1982. “And in that way it not only summed up the history of rock and pop styles in the twentieth century but also predicted the eclectic, all-over-the-map world we’ve been living in ever since.”
As it happens, just yesterday, my chimney sweep brought me a copy of outtakes from the White Album. He says it came by way of a friend of his who used to work at Apple records. I got the impression that meant these particular versions hadn’t ever been commercially released, but I could be wrong about that.
I’ve had the guy come out to my house to clean the chimney and wood stove every winter since I’ve been living here. Upon his noticing my CD collection along one wall of the great room, we immediately bonded over a shared passion for music, and that’s what we represent to each other. Like Robert Fulghum’s barber, the quality of our relationship was partly created by a peculiar distance. We don’t interact in any other way besides the yearly maintenance visits. We don’t call, email, or hang out. We just pick up the conversation every year where we left off — what we’ve been listening to, whom we may have seen live. I usually send him on his way with lists and CD-Rs of music he hadn’t heard, so he decided to return the favor this year.
“It’s really rare,” he said that first year, “to meet somebody beyond their early twenties who still keeps up with new music.” I agreed. Oldies and classic rock stations represent living death to me, so depressing. Sure, I have sentimental favorites too, but I just can’t fathom wanting to hear nothing but. Discovering new music is one of the most invigorating joys I know of.
I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d given him the last time he was out here, so rather than burn a batch of CD-Rs for nothing, I just compiled a list of all the artists and albums I’d enjoyed this year. He grinned and said, “This is all old shit. Where’s your new stuff?” Oh-ho! I’m falling behind, am I? I do believe the gauntlet has been thrown down. Challenge accepted. Until next year, then.
I Think I’m Dumb, Maybe Just Happy
Gram Parsons, who had a greater claim than Michael Nesmith to being the real pioneer of country-rock, once described his musical inheritors, the Eagles, as “bubblegum,” saying that their music had “too much sugar in it. Life is tougher than they make it out to be.” While the Eagles may have deserved his derision, his words could be taken to imply that great music should be difficult and harsh rather than sweet or consoling. Early country and folk music had in fact always mixed up tragedy with comedy, murder ballads with dancing songs and absurd entertainments. Music in hard times often plays the role of allowing mental escape and momentary joy as well as reflecting the people’s suffering. Gram Parsons clearly knew this — even the heartrending, brilliant Grievous Angel album is a bravura mixture of tragedy and wry comedy. What he was really objecting to in the Eagles, apart from their imitation of his own sound, was that they were too smooth and flawless to be genuine country. But in looking for the words to attack their music, he took the easy path of attacking them for not being serious enough, echoing the Lennonesque idea that being purely popular or entertaining was in some way dirty or wrong. Perhaps it is the luxury of a more affluent age to see suffering and misery as glamorous or authentic attributes. Whatever the reasons, from the 1960s onward the retrospective quest for authenticity tended to disregard the light and frothy aspects of earlier music, focusing only on the serious, tragic or intense.
But pop songs don’t exist only to change people’s lives or to change the world. They can also convey simple, banal emotion, and a stupid song like “Sugar Sugar” can sometimes light up the day like a moment of condensed happiness and light, without our needing to think any further about where this song comes from or why it makes us happy. There is no good reason to despise the song for making no attempt to do anything other than this.
This was a good read. Very similar to Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love and R. Jay Magill’s Sincerity.
Saturday Shuffle
- Circus of Power — Circles
- Wye Oak — The Alter
- The Beautiful — Together
- Parralox — Factory Friends
- The Golden Filter — Look Me In the Eye
- Rob Crow — Chucked
- Helen Marnie — We Are the Sea
- Nobody — Our Last Dance
- Diary of Dreams — Traumtänzer
- Goon Moon — Apartment 31
- Systems Officer — Oui
- Cinderella — Coming Home
- The Fratellis — Jesus Stole My Baby
- Eels — Jungle Telegraph
- Galactic Cowboys — About Mrs. Leslie
- KMFDM — Panzerfaust
- pre)Thing — Can’t Stop (22nd Century Lifestyle)
- Faith No More — She Loves Me Not
- Marsheaux — Radial Emotion
- Elbow — Every Bit the Little Girl
Drinking Sand
You might think that a band letting 17 years elapse between their third and fourth albums was unusual. You might therefore assume that there was an interesting reason for such a hiatus. You might even, recklessly, suppose that they could be pleased to be back. All these thoughts seem reasonable, until you try speaking to Mazzy Star about their new record, Seasons of Your Day.
…There is, I suppose, something impressive about the duo’s unwavering purist militancy – their apathy, bordering on revulsion, towards everything to do with music beyond the act of making it. After a miserable hour for all three of us, I’m no longer surprised that they took 17 years to release Seasons of Your Day; I’m amazed they released it at all. Do they even care if anybody beyond their close friends hears their music?
“Maybe, for musicians, it’s common to release things more frequently than we do,” says Roback. “[We’re] like other types of artist. They make their sculpture or painting, they write books or poems, and whether they have an exhibition is almost irrelevant.”
Is this a difficult line of work for such reticent people? Pause. “Only when shyness is misinterpreted as arrogance,” says Roback. Does that happen in their case? Pause. “I don’t really know.” Of course not.
I love me some Mazzy Star in any event, but in this social media fishbowl, where needy oversharing is like the water you swim in, I’m particularly delighted by such passive resistance. Reminds me of another favorite artist, Mark Sandman.