So I feel like getting a few things straight might be in order. This album has guitars. It features every member of the band in some capacity. It has live drums all over the place. In particular, "Magpie" has three guitars, albeit briefly. Are there guitars on every track? of course not. They haven't done that since The Bends. Since when were we expecting another guitar album? They just did one.
Is it short? yeah. It doesn't feel short, though. And this album has a lot of depth and subtlety that wasn't apparent to me on first listen, and not just in a "oh I hadn't noticed that particular funny noise before" kind of way.
As a fan, I'm satisfied. As someone who feigns writing about music, I'm confused. It's almost as if music journalism has been faking their art for so long, saying what they think people expect to read, playing it safe, that music writers have forgotten how to listen to an album and form an opinion and then express it. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing. It's why I'm voicing mine, because I haven't seen it reflected in the press. Sure, the things people are saying are unrefined and knee-jerk, and they're understandably used to having more lead time in writing about big acts. But new music is already moving in a cycle that's this fast. It's not humanly possible to keep up with the flow of new releases from interesting new acts, and the publicity and touring cycles of bands have changed drastically over the past ten years or so. And the lack of research in some articles astounds me. As perhaps the best example I can find of the malaise pervading the coverage of this album, the New York Times put up an article today that stated only one song on the new record was known about prior to release, when in fact four songs, fully half the album, had been played live in the past. It can't be a difficult fact to dig up. Three of the song titles are even the same as when they were played live. The old songs, by the way, are "Magpie", "Lotus Flower", "Give up the Ghost", and "Separator" which used to be known as "Mouse Dog Bird". Magpie was played on a webcast almost a decade ago. Lotus Flower at an Atoms for Peace show in LA. The last two at the Cambridge Corn Exchange UK Green Party benefit show. Check youtube. There's your research, done cheap and easy.
TL;DR: how hard is it to hear what instruments are on an album? not this hard.
Music Journalism should be about aggregating - telling you if music is worth your time, but now when music is available instantly or almost, it's more or less irrelevant to a big band. Radiohead no longer NEED critics (in their opinion they never did). But what of other bands? The new ones that need help to spread the word. I think that's what it should be about. Everyone's got opinions, and some of us like to see them expressed with wit and flair. Music and writing are the things I'm passionate about and I'd still like to be able to combine them, but I think we've all got to find a new way. And as I said before in my Not Rock post, a single listen sketch is NOT a review. Radiohead records in particular take a long time to "get" that's why they've been good in the past. They're not designed to be disposable pop and I don't think it's critically valuable to treat them as such.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to the 50th listen (or whatever) being the one where it all totally falls into place!
the way I see it, the problem is indeed, as you say, trying to say everything possible to say about the album after an impossibly short time. that doesn't mean nothing should be said. what's so absurd is that discernible facts about the album are simply gotten...wrong. seemingly in favor of spending more time on thinking up something safe to say. whatever music journalism IS for these days, this is not it; it's broken.
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