It doesn't happen often but every once in a while I wish I could just listen to music without being so hypercritical about it. Not "critical" as in "negative criticism," more like "being a music critic." I attempt to hear the story within the sounds, so that I can relay that story here. But every once in a while, there comes a band and an album that feels like it should just exist on its own, no story needed. It's just pleasant music. That can be its purpose: to provide pleasure, to be a comfort, to Sound Good.
This is the feeling I get when I listen to Blue Garden—"Hey, this sounds good." There are days when I wish that could just be it. Because that really should be enough! Music can sound good and that's the value of that music, it sounds good. All criticism can boil down to the binary of [1] it sounds good, or [0] it does not sound good. The binary is subjective, and so fucking what. I listen to Delta Sleep and I think that it sure does sound good. Good. Great. Fun.
But most days that feels unsatisfying, to me anyway. It feels like there should be more. There are a billion songs that sound good ([1]) but what makes Delta Sleep's songs special is the thing. It's laborious here because the band doesn't seem to want to give me anything and so I need to sit here on a weekday morning chained in this haunted cubicle and take various stabs at telling the story, making shit up if I have to, applying my own emotions to the endeavor, hot-glue-gunning my own limp felt story to this very good but un-story-able album of music. Which is fine, it's just a lot, and maybe feels like I'm spinning my own wheels sometimes.
I could do it though! Something like—
comfort becomes a necessity in times of stress, stress becomes standard when you're dealing with young kids, stress is discomforting when you put pressure on yourself as a parent to be the best parent you can be but succumb to frustrations, frustrations that are normal because everyone goes through this when children are certain ages, the discomfort doubles because you know its normal but it doesn't feel normal and because it doesn't feel normal then now you're also uncomfortable with the tendency to eschew humility, a need to feel special, this frustration is all mine, I alone require comfort at this time, boo hoo, it's the weekend and you're here in the house and all you can do is pop on the latest RC offering, a promise of twisty time signatures that don't really feel all that twisty the more times you hit repeat, the music ends up being the comfort, which is also not special but also feels special to you in that moment, that anyone or anything would deign to provide comfort to a very not special dad in this time of self-inflicted woe, feels good, the music feels good, feels right in that moment, something about the vocals, which are soothing, which is not expected based on description, "math rock" arriving with the assumption that this is going to be jarring music, that the irregular rhythms will elicit irregular emotions, but it doesn't turn out that way, surprisingly, and not just because there is way more 4/4 on here than the genre tag of math rock would imply, and also maybe the math can be found within the crevices of that 4/4 time, polyrhythms that have a lopsided feel but ultimately add up to a nice round even number (shit, okay, math, I get it now), but all of these complications somehow become soothing, which is interesting to think about, the why and how, recalling back way way back to when practicing the ancient art of drumming meant pulling apart rhythms and figuring out how it works, like a clockmaker and his clock, examining all the cogs and levers and seeing how they all fit together and function together in unison, the spiky guitars are the gear train and the punchy drums are the oscillator and the crystal clear vocals are the second hand, spinning, spinning, there's an art to it all, a sense of peace to examine something and understand it, it's not mastery but there's a baseline knowledge there, and it makes you feel fucking good, fucking right, and to be able to listen to Blue Garden and not be confused by the language, the rhythms, but instead feel comfort in the understanding, and joy in the comfort, and satisfaction in the joy, all these emotions turning in unison too, like the gears and cogs, it's true, I'm satisfied, I feel good listening to this album because it makes sense in my brain, it's intangible without torturing a clock metaphor, it's incomplete without telling painfully mundane stories from a childhood filled with lessons about what it means to have rhythm, be a rhythm, function as a rhythm, rhythm as art, art as life, and you follow the gears back far enough and you see what the power source here is, it's nostalgia, of course, always is, but this nostalgia isn't for a specific event, it's more like nostalgia for a feeling, stretched so far back that it's tough to even describe, but it's there, and I feel it when I listen to this math rock
—or whatever, I don't know. I could write about anything, and ultimately, it would probably sound like bullshit. I feel what I feel and sometimes that doesn't matter, at least in the context of music criticism. If you're here to hear my story, then you got some semblance of it. If you're here for the binary, then you're getting that too. That's what it boils down to. Is it good or not good? It's good. I enjoyed it. Who cares why.
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment