This month’s haul of new music had the feel of a “looking back”, the look of a nostalgic bent.
Big Star’s return, Posies in tow, “In Space” prompted a belated airing of the late Chris Bell’s “I Am The Cosmos”. Maybe the two will mesh to create a cosmic Big Star, a divine reunion of aural majesty? Quite in theme, and with the present and the power pop demographic in mind, we also have Teenage Fanclub’s “Man-Made”. Is this as good as their “Grand Prix”?
Continuing this look over our shoulders, this time to the late, great past, are The Reivers’ “Saturday” (1987), Material Issue’s “International Pop Overthrow” (1991), The Rooks’ “Encore Echoes”; Richard X Heyman’s “Basic Glee”(2002) closes this month’s collection.
On reflection, there is no “then” and “now” with good music: they are of an integral whole. Chris Bell’s posthumous 1979 album and this year’s releases are separated by numbers designating Christian Time; in our sense of things, in the personal history of music, there is the fullness of a physical extension between points that ridicules the false urgency of temporal measure. Such musicology creates a space of familiarity through dissonance; like my buddy Yudson said:
Life is full of distortion
It makes sense. Remember when we wore our records and tapes out, and how compact discs appeared in the early 80s as an indestructible god-send? Truth be told, it brought with it a nasty under-belly. These compact discs cut-off frequencies at 20KHz, compared to the typical LP’s cuts-off at 36KHz. Even though we don’t actually hear anything above 20KHz, that potential, that spectrum of hidden reserves found in LPs is important; sound cannot be directly expressed as sound in this inaudible zone, but rather finds expression as distortion, dirty noise, so to speak, the non-linguistic hum to our verbose world. That friction, that resistance against which we measure up to, that is why we love it so.
The “dreamt up” clarity of the compact disc brought with it a clinical-ness that raged to reduce all to definition. Even this hum.
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