I don’t know where I got the impression that they were boringly gentle, either. It’s weird how you get these weird impressions of bands - I’ve been hearing about them for so long that I kind of accidentally built up this little cluster of impressions around them, mostly, it seems, plucked from thin air.
This is something Song By Toad said last week about Neutral Milk Hotel, whom Mr. Toad just heard for the first time. It stuck out at me because I'd just finished saying something similar about Brian Eno the day before, in that the pop of Another Green World—even the overall melodicism of the proto-ambient tracks, for that matter—was at odds with my expectations. I was prepared for minimalism. Vocals, guitar solos, even the general sense of warmth that permeates the record—all were a surprise to me. Like Mr. Toad, I'd built up a "cluster of impressions... plucked from thin air."
I said something similar about Neu!, too, who are more less new to me this year. I like Neu! more than Neu! 75 in part because, as I said last week, "I long had an impression of what Neu! was supposed to sound like, and Neu! 75 wasn't really it." (My preference for one over the other is more complex than that, but nevertheless I recognize that expectation is part of it.) In the comments to that post, Richard had a similar response:
As for Neu!—I was really surprised by them. Since, like you, Stereolab was how I got interested them, before the reissues, I expected a certain type of sound (and I was coming from the Transient Noise Bursts period of Stereolab). Only one or two of the tracks on Neu!2 have ever really met my pre-conceived notion
On one level or another, every album that has been described to you prior to your hearing it will cause some disconnect between your expectation and your actual perception. (I'd argue that any album that doesn't cause this disconnect probably doesn't stay in rotation for long.) Dear Science Comma [Comma?] has been out for less than a month, but that doesn't mean you're not developing a "cluster of impressions" about what it might sound like—ice skating to heaven, perhaps?—only to reframe your understanding of the record once you've listened to it (imho, it's more like windsurfing through purgatory). Not only might you have to reconsider what the band is "supposed" to sound like--what you thought they were supposed to sound like—but also perhaps where they fit into the musical landscape at large.
I had that kind of disconnect/reconnect experience, for example, with the Fiery Furnaces when I heard them for the first time earlier this year. I was expecting something like a second-rate Yeah Yeah Yeahs or perhaps a lo-fi Animal Collective—don't ask me why, but that's the cluster of impressions I'd built for myself—only to hear a band that is aggressively more complex, and probably the band of the day that I would laud for having a firm, considered, fresh aesthetic perspective on pop music and where it is capable of going.
- The Fiery Furnaces, Clear Signal from Cairo
It's one thing to have your cluster of impressions about a fairly new band or album dispersed upon actually hearing it. It's far more pronounced when it happens on a musical blind spot—an album or artist that is firmly part of the history of rock and roll, which you've managed to never actually hear. Like Eno, or any krautrock band, or Neutral Milk Hotel (whose album is, after all, more than a decade old now). To go ten years or more with an impression of a band, only to have it dissolve within thirty seconds of hearing the first track—it can be a dramatic musical epiphany, causing you not only to rethink the artist in question, but also all of the artists that came after. Just think: you thought Jeff Mangum was a twee, Sarah Records–loving sadboy lamenting the tear in his sweater; then you hear "The King of Carrot Flowers," with its morbidly surreal/surreally morbid imagery. You thought Eno was droning synths and blurbs and bleeps, then you hear the jagged guitar, fluid bass, and harmonizing refrains of "Sky Saw"; You thought Neu! was supposed to be the uber-definition of "motorik"—one steady drumbeat, no fills, rigid as a factory assembly line—only to hear the light-as-air ambiance of "Isi" or "Seeland."
- Neu!, Seeland
Mr. Toad talked about how, after listening to NMH, bands like the Decemberists or Beirut suddenly existed in a new context. It's acutally the perfect illustration of what I'm talking about. You listen to either of those bands and everyone tells you that they owe a debt to Jeff Mangum. So you build up an impression of NMH that their lyrics must have a literary edge to them; that Mangum's voice probably occupies a certain range, and maybe he carries on a little while he sings; that maybe there's an accordian or some kind of world music influence. All of those things are somewhat true. But the reality is whatever the Decemberists or Beirut are lifting from Mangum, it's not the essence of Neutral Milk Hotel. Personally, I'd argue that those acts are barely skimming the surface of the waters NMH treads in, to the extent that it's almost offensive to align the groups. Neither is as intimately connected, on a kind of personal level I can barely understand, to their lyrics or imagery. Neither has sewn together a single album into the kind of tapestry that In the Aeroplane over the Sea is. Neither has made a record that congeals its historical, personal, and musical components into a perfect whole.
- Neutral Milk Hotel, The King of Carrot Flowers, pt. 1
At the same time, I saw a documentary on Syd Barrett a few months ago, and hearing snippets from his post-Pink Floyd material—which I've never heard in full—opened at least a small window for me; namely that Mangum owes his own debts. To what extent, I don't yet know. (Wait 'til I buy more Barrett and I'll pick that thread up). The thing that jumped out at me was a similarity in their vocal delivery--a kind of wailing moan--over simple acoustic guitar. That may well be the extent of what Mangum lifts, leaving the rest of Barrett's distinct style and personality to Barrett. Just as the Decemberists barely lift anything worthwhile from Neutral Milk Hotel. Just as Stereolab didn't so much as rip off Neu! as riff on one or two specific Neu! songs. Just as the many musicians who credit Eno as an influence are not really thinking of "I'll Come Running" when they say so.
I'm sure I could think of others. What about you? Any albums (new or old) you finally heard that sounded completely unlike what you'd built them up to be in your mind?
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