Wednesday, January 14, 2009

An Index of Metals - shudder

Reading reviews of "art" - be it music, a movie, or "fine art" like painting or sculptures - can be frustrating. Many times, I read the review, and then watch or listen to the show and think "are they seeing/hearing the same thing that I am?" I wrote about this experience here, and recently experienced it again when reading this Pitchfork review of the re-release of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno's Evening Star album.

Now, I have Evening Star, and most of it is really good. The first four tracks are quite calm and assured: it's Eno's ambient music but with energy contributed by Fripp's guitar. Fripp does a lot of interesting things here - apparently the guitar-nerds call it "frippertronics" - that involve looping guitar tracks back upon themselves and then playing over it. Regardless of how it's done, the first two songs on the album ("Wind on Water" and "Evening Star") are essentially one song with a slow ambient introduction followed by a mood poem that makes me feel like i'm watching the sun set over a distant island on the Pacific Ocean (see the apt cover and you'll know what i'm talking about). In mood, it reminds me a bit of Debussy's "nature" songs.

However, the last song on the album - the 28 minute (!) "An Index of Metals" - is truly awful. While some music majors may find it brilliant, to me it just sounds to me like annoying random noise. And i'm a fan of random noise! I love Sonic Youth, and was one of the few to throw down a few bucks to pick up Neil Young's Arc (the all-feedback coda to his excellent double-live LP Weld). But "An Index of Metals" is brutal. It's dissonance for the sake of it; a bloated, self-indulgent "song" that is simply unlistenable. I can't imagine the person that would listen to it more than once.

But according to the Pitchfork critic, it's "a six-track sequence" (whatever that means). There's no mention about its length or unaccessability. Despite this, he provides the album a 8.6 (out of 10), a score I might agree with if it wasn't for the last track.

This is why I like blog reviews. The agenda of the writer is usually up front, so you can judge if the blogger's taste is your own instead of having to read through the lines of the regular media's "objective" prose. In addition, being online, they aren't limited by space so they include everything that they feel is relevant to the situation. The best example of this is an excellent music review site I found written by George Starostin. He doesn't update it any more, but it contains extensive, knowledgeable, and irreverently opinionated reviews of most of the major rock and post-rock bands from 1960-2000.

George doesn't pull any punches when it comes to "An Index of Metals". His notes about the track include: "Darn it, why did these guys want to piss us off so much? ... Suffice it to say that some stretches of this track just consist of one note prolonged for what seems like ages."

So is there a lesson to be learned here? To me, the trick to finding a review that will let you know if you will like a work or art or not, is all about finding a reviewer that has your general taste. This can be tricky, but the internet's a big place, so you're bound to find something sooner or later.

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