The habit is partly a means to ensure I feel that I'm getting my money's worth out of my purchases, but I think it's stuck because it's also paid off musically. A number of my favorite albums- Talk Talk's "Laughing Stock" and "Spirit of Eden," The Flaming Lips' "Embryonic," Panda Bear's "Person Pitch," the Mountain Goats' earliest albums- I found either unremarkable or off-putting on the first listen; it was the concentrated, repeated listening that revealed their qualities.
I by no means consider this the "right" way to listen to music, just the way that's worked for me. But I'm sure it has had a significant effect on the fact those favorite albums are what they are. For one thing, it probably ties in to how I define terms like "craftsmanship" and "good songwriting". I'm probably going to be more impressed by musical decisions that don't fully pay off until the seventh listen than someone whose listening habits are less intensive or systematic, and emphasize them more heavily in my personal definition of those general terms. (There's probably a lot of writing to be done on that topic; I'll save it for future posts.)
I've also found that I tend to disagree with the common album-review complaint that an album has a "slow midsection" or starts strong before declining in quality, and I suspect I can define that difference very specifically in terms of listening habits. I can't speak authoritatively for any given reviewer, but I think it's fair to say that they're listening to music with some different parameters than mine. Most clearly, they're facing deadline pressures to finish reviews by release dates, while I take as much time as I please- and this may place fairly strict limits on the time they listen to the album, depending on how soon in advance they can get review copies. While I'm devoting my leisure time to these albums in as deliberate a fashion as I like, I assume most reviewers are trying to juggle one review among various other work tasks. And while I can ramble on as long as I like on this here blog, many reviewers are probably facing some degree of restraint on their word counts, creating the imperative to highlight their most concise criticisms (or praise).
The result I frequently see is that I agree with reviewer criticisms of weak sections of albums on roughly my third or fourth listen- and disagree after several more of my listens. Pitchfork hung much of its criticism of Elbow's most recent album, "Build a Rocket Boys!," on the criticism of a "pokey midsection" that "abates melodically." As far as I can infer, this has to be the two tracks between "Neat Little Rows," which the review itself highlights as "stomping," and "High Ideals," which has arguably the most complex arrangement on the album. Those two tracks didn't register with me much, either, for a while. But listened to on its own terms, it sounds to me like "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" has just as much melody as anything else on the album- it just took a while to come through in the album context because it's so much quieter than its surroundings. I'll still grant that "The Night Will Always Win" may be one of the weaker songs of the album, but it can't bear the weight of a "pokey midsection" all by itself.
Pitchfork similarly criticizes the songwriting on the Title Tracks' "In Blank" for "petering out a little" after a strong first four songs. (Not intending to pick on Pitchfork here- I see this in reviews from plenty of sources, these are just the examples that are coming to mind.) Which, again, is consistent with my experience on early listens; the first four songs were so immediate and consistent to dominate my experience. But that eventually smoothed out a few listens later- the chorus of "All Tricks" has just as much melodic snap as anything on the album, it just took a few more listens to sink in.
I'll admit I don't have authoritative knowledge of the process by which the reviewers listened to these albums. But this is a pattern I see often enough to make this a reasonable hypothesis: reviewers can tend to have less immersive listening experiences to an album than I will, and that are more likely to diverge in opinions on album pacing as a result. To be clear, I don't find anything wrong with this. Reviewers may be less immersed for reasons outside their control, and there may be plenty of other listeners who listen to music differently than I do anyhow.
I should note that I also believe my system may bring its own biases to the table. I may have a tendency to underrate albums that are oriented towards immediacy and don't gain as much value-added on the tenth listen. This may drive me away from, say, even the best of simple punk-pop, as much as I might enjoy the first-listen experience. I also may have a tendency to dismiss albums that don't vary much in tempo, tone, or melody for the entire duration, even if I might enjoy any given song on the album if it came up in an iPod shuffle. At some point in the future I'll have to revisit some music that could fit either description and put these guesses to the test.
No comments:
Post a Comment