Word: listenability
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Slightly better news is that for the first time in several months, there's a new ROCK record--not a "pop" record or a "noise" record or an "artsy, but it's got a backbeat" record--that's actually exciting and challenging to listen to. aMINIATURE have clearly heard a lot of Big Black and a lot of Replacements--there's one song, "Featurist," on this disc that wouldn't sound out of place on the 'Placemats' LET IT BE LP. But the best analogy for aMINIATURE's sound is a defunct Richmond, VA band called Honor Role, who combined...
...Overseers, a fact that is disturbing to some members of the Harvard Faculty Council. There is little doubt that the government's interest in funding a program of area studies--linguistic and cultural--has to do with the long-range goal of producing diplomats and intelligence experts. But listen to the Council's statement explaning why that is distasteful...
...people buy soundtracks? Last year the soundtrack to that stupid movie with Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner stayed at number one for weeks, and some movies now seem like no more than extended videos for their soundtracks. You could sit back and listen to the tunes from "Singles" while the movie was still in production. There are only two possible motivations for owning a soundtrack: either it has something to do with the movie itself--you know, replicating that feeling of awe as you walk out of the theater, pretending that your life is as coherent and meaningful...
...from the period when the movie is set: "Voodoo Child" by Jimi Hendrix, "A Dedicated Follower of Fashion" by the Kinks, "Is This Love" by Bob Marley, and "Whiskey In A Jar" by Thin Lizzy. These songs are just fantastic, though you probably don't need this disc to listen to them, and it doesn't particularly add to their brilliance to hear them together. They were great in the movie itself: a riot in Belfast set to "Voodoo Child" was amazing, and Daniel Day Lewis' visit to a bunch of dosed prison inmates listening to Marley was pretty cool...
...Raincoats were different. Their interest in a music that would be primarily about, and for, women's experience may have been HOW they came by their sound, but it's the sound, and the songs, themselves that will catch and hold your attention on the first or the fiftieth listen-just as they have held Mr. Cobain...