I posted this at the Record Room (
http://s3.excoboard.com/therecordroom/29211/1038366) but thought some people here who don't go there might have some interest in the idea and want to talk.
............
This isn't a Peggy Lee thread, and this is the only sentence that references the song by the same name. Rather, this is about a feeling I'm not sure exists in quite the same way--if at all--it had until the Youtube, Spotify, and file-sharing years to and including now: underwhelmed disappointment.
We still wait for the next album or song, though not as long, with it easier and cheaper to record and release music and leaks of many or most major releases. But the hunt to hear existing music is largely gone unless you're specific enough in your needs, e.g., only a certain pressing of vinyl will suffice. If you're a typical listener, you can find out within a few keystrokes, themselves most likely much of your machine's doing thanks to predictive autocompletion, and a few minutes of listening, possibly cut once you read a featured comment that hit the spot or a nerve.
Somewhere around 1999, I read of a mysterious album by a mysterious band. I knew of a couple of its members and the story of this band had the makings of myth to me then. It wasn't an album I should hear because I might like it, but an album that would launch itself atop my favorites list as it redeemed modern music and got me into the club of people in the know. Excessive praise? How should I have known, I hadn't heard the damn album yet and was going by effusive praise of envied acquaintances and critics.
This wasn't a quest for the Holy Grail for me, because a) now out of college, I
did have a more-than-full-time job to do, after all, and couldn't dedicate all my time and resources to album-hunting, especially because, after all, ya gotta leave time for liquor. But again and again the topic would pop up and again and again I had to say "I've heard
of it, but haven't heard it." Embarrassed and ignorant. Damnit.
I got lucky some indefinite number of years later--I want to say 2007 or '08. Hammering out the barely yet-then-familiar percussion of CD claps as I flipped through Monday's or Tuesday's or some day's new arrivals, I saw it, the long-sought-after words in the upper left and lower right of a picture that struck and strikes me as totally wrong. Just ugly and … well, just
wrong. The picture is a circle split in four wedges, each containing a fourth of a painted face. Maybe it's famous, maybe one of them did it, I don't fucking know. But I hated and hate it and was disappointed this was going to be the face of what, at long last (and with Smile more or less released thanks to Brian Wilson Presents…), my new favorite album.
The Grays' RoShamBo was a huge fucking disappointment. Maybe had I found it when I first heard of it, back in the very late '90s, or even more when it was put out, several years earlier still. But between a nearly 10-year build-up and my tastes closing in on the other end of their orbit from its aesthetic, I was really underwhelmed.
Technically there is nothing to complain about. These guys (most notably Jon Brion and Jason Falkner, if you aren't familiar) were good. Yet then and now it felt to me more like a master class in making pop songs than it felt like actual pop songs. Well played, well arranged, well recorded, well produced, and even cleverly (if not well) written songs, but nothing to connect to the me who was listening. I want to say it sounds not just competent, but expert, yet entirely uninspired, but I can't say that because I don't have the slightest clue what inspires these guys; instead I'll say entirely lacking whatever inspires me, and so uninspiring to me.
One of the songs came up a little while ago on my iTunes shuffle ("Nothing") and the whole thought (and recollection) came back: this, fair or not, was
so disappointing!The same feeling has struck me a thousand times. Somewhere between often and usually I change my mind eventually. (As I've referenced before, my list of flip-flops is epic--it could make a nice little rock 'n' roll hall of fame, ranging as it does from Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, David Bowie, and Bob Dylan up to Radiohead, Belle & Sebastian, Grizzly Bear, and Amy Winehouse.) Other times--the Grays probably chief among them--it sticks. Is that all there is?
(Okay, I lied earlier: twice.)
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