I killed the rock album. I did it this week with Romance Is Boring. Romance is Boring is a fifteen song cycle by Los Campesinos released January 26th. Is it good? It’s great. It is of a piece in music and in sound, it is a song cycle about writing short stories (and other stuff but that’ll do for now) and if you give them a chance all the songs kick and kick well. Tracks #2 thru #5 are as good as rock gets or, in my opinion, ever has. And it builds and builds to a coda that echoes effortlessly back to an earlier song on the album, maybe the best “shape of a heat rash”. The last song has the entire band (a biggie seven members when it would be cheaper to pay session players and keep to a foursome), first with one guy singing back-up (maybe double tracked): “the first time, the last time, all the times in-between the first time, the last time, all the times i would’ve liked there to have been.” and then the entire band “I can’t believe I chose the mountains every time you chose the sea”. I don’t know what Garth’s point is but I don’t particularly cre. It is cheerful sounding rock holding deadly information which, if you work your way through to the end, pays it off with that recurring sea image. Not waving but drowning, indeed.
I prefer it as a buncha tracks I put on playlists and I leave to grab me or not as the case maybe.
I can’t listen to an album.
There have been some killers this year, Contra, The Sea -others… I don’t REALLY listen to em (just out of duty to Rock NYC). It’s not the way I hear music anymore. I was discussing Lil Wayne with a friend of mine today and I went for songs in a different way then even the possibility of there being a uniform sound to Rebirth even though the very first song, “American Star” opens with an obviously hendrix influenced guitar solo. I don’t give it any credence and even if I did, she wouldn’t have.
Contra is so all of a type and all the (reported, I never read em) press kits in the world can’t make it sound LESS OF A PIECE. But they released “Horchata” and “Cousins” a coupla months before the album and when we got the album the big set pieces, “Diplomat’s Son”, “Taxicab” and “I Think You’re A Contra” suddenly stood out too much. Listeners kinda ignored the songs they knew. The album felt so weighted we had to back into it as tracks.
This change feels kinda irreversible. Maybe if streaming audio clubs click it’ll make a difference, but till then, with all the best wishes in the world, the album is dead even when gifted musicians make em and we listen to em. We simply don’t hear music that way any more.