So Tonight That I Might See
Mazzy Star
1993
I don't do spoilers for music. It's not quite the same as movies, which I also don't do spoilers for. With movies, I don't want to be spoiled to the plot details. With music, I don't want to be spoiled to what it sounds like until I sit down with an album and listen to it front-to-back. This means that I can't read anything about a movie beforehand, but there's no issue reading about music. I can't hear what it sounds like from reading a music review or an interview or anything like that. Even if I had read something about Mazzy Star before listening to this album, I don't think I would've been spoiled to the facts of the first song on the album. "Fade into You" is a song that I absolutely know very well, except for the fact that I didn't know its title or author, and so when it came on, it was like... oh shit, this is Mazzy Star? And that feels good. Thank god for no spoilers.
How I know "Fade into You" by Mazzy Star is a different story. It's not a complicated one, but it does thread a certain needle. I'm told that it was big on MTV and alt-radio back in the day. So this was the mid-'90s. I'm cognizant of what's on the radio but I'm not at the age yet when I'm concerned about the who or why of the music that enters my ears. I'm assuming that I heard it the requisite number of times that it permanently stuck to the walls of my brain (what's that number? somewhere between 25 and 50 maybe?). However, the other crucial element is that the song needs to never achieve cultural ubiquity in my adulthood. It never soundtracked a famous Stranger Things scene, it was never covered by boygenius, it never served as the hook to a big Mazzy Star reunion tour, it was never used at a campaign stop by a rapist presidential nominee causing a flurry of lawsuits, it never happens to pass through my ears randomly on the radio. It just kinda sat there, dormant, until one day it was Mazzy Star's turn to be a Blind Spot based on name alone and I hit play and BOOM, the sounds come rushing back.
I like "Fade into You" but its engine runs mostly on nostalgia. Not even nostalgia for any specific memories, just nostalgia for a feeling. Otherwise, I wouldn't normally label this as "my shit." It's really pleasant but a little soft. The rest of So Tonight That I Might See operates as mostly the same volume, but manages to stretch the definition of the word and find interesting corners of the softness. This is not "Fade into You" times ten. There's variety.
I'm particularly drawn to the strange darkness of seven-minute title track, with its drones and feedback. It honestly reminds me of something the Velvet Underground would have done. It's like "Venus in Furs" stretched even further. Another song, "Mary of Silence," recalls the Doors. That sounds even more preposterous for the band that made "Fade into You," but it's true. After thinking about that comparison, I found a list of best dream pop. Mazzy Star is on their twice (including a #2 ranking for this album), and both blurbs namecheck Jim Morrison, so I'm not the only fucking lunatic out there. Sure, there are some nice pleasant folky ballads too, like "Blue Light." But that's certainly not the whole album. "Blue Light" is easily balanced by something like the chugging blues of "Wasted."
There's a story with Mazzy Star, but it's not that unique, at least relative to the bands of that era. Some of its members were part of a previous band (Opal), who operated in a scene (Paisley Underground), and the new band elevated the sounds of that scene. They had a niche breakout hit, and never found success quite like that ever again. They still kick around these parts, and have two major releases in the 2010s. They are just a band. A band that made music. They lived and they'll eventually die and they have good songs and that one big one will probably live forever. That's it.
The important part, though, is not spoiling all that for yourself. Let the music speak for itself. Hit play, and see how the story unravels from there.
No comments:
Post a Comment