Because Neil Kulkarni has produced what is probably the best review/polemic of an album I’ve seen in YEARS. Eloquent, yet able to keep a high level of righteous anger and indignation about the lazy hipness that passes for quality these days. Takes in everything from originality in music, to retro-ism, to dealing with youth culture in general.
Take this snippet…
It’d help musicians if the music press they read would shake up the trad cannon now and then, question the official past more, start ruling a few things OUT rather than just waive all the same old classics through the gates to be arranged & neutered into the same mutually-re(v/f)erential lists and hierarchies. A shake up of that order’s not gonna happen any time soon (rubs forefinger & thumb together, rolls eyes), but it’s gonna have to if indie rock wants a way out of its current political/musical/sexual/lyrical holding patterns. With an at-least-slightly-cockeyed vision of the past (and that’s gonna be found thru writers who feel like the past is worth fighting over, not just for alphabeticising or ranking) retroism needn’t be a problem, I love plenty of impossibly dated music but only when I feel like I’m hearing a human being with a reason to be doing this, not just a fucking muso with the taste/learning required to earn ‘the right’ to do this. When mind-numbingly predictable sources are blended in a way that gives next-to-nothing of the people involved, if you feel as you’re listening that what was in mind was not art or expression or truth but simply the unctuous clever-clever stacking up of taste to the point where personality is voided, then I’m sorry, that’s a shitty motivation to make music and I see no reason why I should have any motivation in listening to it. Nothing to say and, fatally, nothing to sound out, just cross-referencing, filing, no failures in technique but a massive fatal failure of spirit that thus keeps Peace tethered to their sources, unable to add anything, doomed to be a grab-bag, a precis of an era thankfully long gone. Fucksake, I remember where I was at the early 90s student-bop much of ‘In Love’ tries to replicate. I was sat on the steps pointing my plastic pistol at these future captains-of-industry fantastising killingthese motherfuckers. I knew then that they were a closed club and they’d end up running tings. No fucking change at all. Look at them being interviewed. Just look for a second.
It’s one of those pieces that once you’ve read it, you begin to notice that everywhere you look and hear, you´re surrounded by mediocre dross, pimped and packed to you as something that matters. And as for those bands themselves… you know who you are…..
As for me…. I’ve filed a mental note saying “Must try harder”
PS – Listened to the album yesterday. I can really see where he’s coming from with this. Everything is a life of a lift of an old tune that you can hear on Q radio or something. Abject blandness…
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