A delicate and inoffensive response to Blake's comments on Wilco.
I toyed with the title "Impossibly Germane" but found it too thesaurus-y... and couldn't make sense of the pun, really
The music blogosphere's infatuation-and-immediate-rejection of Vampire Weekend was so swift I was a third of the way through my first listen of their album before the TRON was already telling me it sucked and they were prettyboys. I was naked at the Stephen Malkmus show last month in DC without a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and tight clever t-shirt, but was more singled out by the fact that I actually seemed to be enjoying the music and rocking out.
I toyed with the title "Impossibly Germane" but found it too thesaurus-y... and couldn't make sense of the pun, really
The music blogosphere's infatuation-and-immediate-rejection of Vampire Weekend was so swift I was a third of the way through my first listen of their album before the TRON was already telling me it sucked and they were prettyboys. I was naked at the Stephen Malkmus show last month in DC without a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and tight clever t-shirt, but was more singled out by the fact that I actually seemed to be enjoying the music and rocking out.
So certainly image will control expectation. People at the 9:30 club who knew about Pavement expected the guys and gals on stage to be as indifferent as they were; the reality is that Stephen Malkmus has grown into a very serious musician and talented guitar player.
Yeah. A lot of times expectation vs. output is unfair to both parties. Maybe I'd enjoy the Green Album infinitely more if it were just a great pop album by a band that hadn't made Pinkerton. So is that me being a good Weezer fan or a bad Weezer fan? Am I not loyal to a band for criticizing or disliking something they've done just because it is different? What if they just make a worse version of the same thing?
A.M. was one of my first "independent" music purchases... not readily-accessed by everyone, not popular in the sense of radio play and record sales.. It was part of me wanting to identify myself as an "alt.country fan," and Blake's observations on fandom certainly applied here. I liked it because it was exactly what I wanted out of a band that had been half of Uncle Tupelo, the founding fathers of the movement.
And then for a long time, I also could very easily "get" Being There, as two-faced as the album is... but nothing else. Even as YHF clicked over 20 or 30 listens and the Mermaid Avenues are very accesible, Summerteeth still is vaguely-defined. I can picture an album cover and get an overall feeling of an album. You can too, just think of Abbey Road or Dark Side. But with Summerteeth, something is hidden between the desolation of "She's a Jar" and the Sunday-afternoon murmur of the title track. It is both poppy and painful with roots firmly entrenched in both the two-minute radio song and mournful country ballads. I think of the album cover and I still can't put my finger on it. It is the turning-point in Wilco's discography where they quit writing songs and start putting together soundscapes and albums... even if those soundscapes are stacked on top of really normal folk songs, they grew up as a band on Summerteeth and it is an amazing listen.
It is uncompromisingly honest as an album and as individual songs and this is what has always defined Tweedy's music to me. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot upped the ante, but Summerteeth was the first sign of Tweedy's limitless ceiling as a songwriter and musician.
So with Wilco, I can ignore "folk" and I can even ignore "challenging," but the one thing I think you can always hold an artist accountable for is honesty. And with such a track record of both musical and lyrical honesty, shouldn't Wilco's bar be higher? Dropping fandom and dropping expectation, how do I feel about Sky Blue Sky? When the best compliment you can come up with for an album is that the band "feels comfortable playing together" (something I said trying to get myself to like it after seeing the comment in a review), then something's missing.
For me, anyway. If I picture the album cover of SBS in my head, I come away with a feeling of dull. It feels dishonest for Wilco to be so dull, and that, fan or not, I am having a hard time reconciling.
Yeah. A lot of times expectation vs. output is unfair to both parties. Maybe I'd enjoy the Green Album infinitely more if it were just a great pop album by a band that hadn't made Pinkerton. So is that me being a good Weezer fan or a bad Weezer fan? Am I not loyal to a band for criticizing or disliking something they've done just because it is different? What if they just make a worse version of the same thing?
A.M. was one of my first "independent" music purchases... not readily-accessed by everyone, not popular in the sense of radio play and record sales.. It was part of me wanting to identify myself as an "alt.country fan," and Blake's observations on fandom certainly applied here. I liked it because it was exactly what I wanted out of a band that had been half of Uncle Tupelo, the founding fathers of the movement.
And then for a long time, I also could very easily "get" Being There, as two-faced as the album is... but nothing else. Even as YHF clicked over 20 or 30 listens and the Mermaid Avenues are very accesible, Summerteeth still is vaguely-defined. I can picture an album cover and get an overall feeling of an album. You can too, just think of Abbey Road or Dark Side. But with Summerteeth, something is hidden between the desolation of "She's a Jar" and the Sunday-afternoon murmur of the title track. It is both poppy and painful with roots firmly entrenched in both the two-minute radio song and mournful country ballads. I think of the album cover and I still can't put my finger on it. It is the turning-point in Wilco's discography where they quit writing songs and start putting together soundscapes and albums... even if those soundscapes are stacked on top of really normal folk songs, they grew up as a band on Summerteeth and it is an amazing listen.It is uncompromisingly honest as an album and as individual songs and this is what has always defined Tweedy's music to me. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot upped the ante, but Summerteeth was the first sign of Tweedy's limitless ceiling as a songwriter and musician.
So with Wilco, I can ignore "folk" and I can even ignore "challenging," but the one thing I think you can always hold an artist accountable for is honesty. And with such a track record of both musical and lyrical honesty, shouldn't Wilco's bar be higher? Dropping fandom and dropping expectation, how do I feel about Sky Blue Sky? When the best compliment you can come up with for an album is that the band "feels comfortable playing together" (something I said trying to get myself to like it after seeing the comment in a review), then something's missing.
For me, anyway. If I picture the album cover of SBS in my head, I come away with a feeling of dull. It feels dishonest for Wilco to be so dull, and that, fan or not, I am having a hard time reconciling.
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