A few days ago, TheYank pointed me in the direction of Davy, the second album by actor Jason Schwartzman’s solo project Coconut Records. I remarked that it reminded me of a more indie version of Of Montreal without the gender bending and with the softness of The Postal Service.
Which is a strange thing to do, given we could both hear it, so why bother with references to other bands?
Perhaps it’s because of the history of music press? I remember in the late 1980s that the only way to hear new music (without purchasing it) was to hang out with friends, at record shops, or go to clubs and gigs. It was very rare for Melody Maker, Sounds or NME to issue 7″ samplers. So the best way to properly convey a particular song, album or band was to compare it to others. This was problematic, because it required the reader to know those others.
When I was first encountered the unfamiliar world of independent music, it was through my friends’ record collections. I ended up purchasing a lot of what they already had, using this as a bootstrap for my own listening experiments. The issue with music reviews at that time (apart from the obvious pretension, which I was always totally okay with) was that to properly appreciate them, you already had to know a lot of music.
Despite the arrival of digital music which allows us almost instant access to, you know, the actual music, reviews are still like this. Part of this is due to authors self-aggrandising, but the primary reason is that simply mentioning another artist brings a heap of musical and contextual references that, if stated explicitly, would otherwise bog them down.
This leads me to conclude that regardless of where technology takes us in the future, there will still be a place for music reviews, and that one’s own process of discovery will be as scarily exciting as it’s always been.
