Poking at Albums with "Pokey Midsections"

I am a major cheapskate who buys a lot of music, and still buys it in album form. (I attribute the album-buying primarily to the presence of good used CD stores near home, but inertia and creeping curmudgeonliness probably have something to do with it, too.) The listening habit I've developed to square that circle is to listen to every album I buy at least 10 to 12 times, usually concentrated over the course of a week or so before I move on to the next album.

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.

The Saturation Principle

I've got plenty of friends who enjoy them, but I just can't muster any interest in the Lumineers. Just my latest example of the hipster's lament: dismissing some popular band, even one that works within a broad genre (acoustic singer-songwriters) I listen to a lot.



It's fair for you to question whether I'm dismissing them for their popularity. Hell, I probably have dug a hole with those of you who have known me for a while by being pretty douche-y about those kind of arguments in college. (My wife is nodding right now.)

A lot of those college-age musical arguments were mostly just less-than-graceful efforts at self-definition. (My fellow socially awkward, indie-listening friends are nodding right now.) But older, fairer, more secure me still thinks the same way, and I think it boils down to two differences I still have with the sort of "average" listener that may like a popular band I dismiss.

1. I've listened to a LOT of music. I own around 850 albums, and that number grows almost weekly. For about the last 12 years, I've been listening to music an average of 6-8 hours a day, and that usually includes at least 15-20 minutes spent reading music-related sites and articles. 

2. I listen to music for its own sake. Less obvious, perhaps, but just as important. I don't primarily treat my albums as background music. More often than not, when I'm listening, I'm trying to actively engage with my music- listening to albums numerous times to catch their nuances, thinking about how it compares to that band's body of work or to other bands in the genre, listening to spot songs or moments that I think are great, maybe even starting a blog so I can pontificate about what I'm listening to.

In combination, those two facts make me vulnerable to what I'll call the saturation principle: the more music I listen to and actively engage with, the more likely I'll find it difficult to engage with a new piece of music, because to me it will sound similar to music I've heard before.

The effect of this principle is more or less a generalized version of the experience of listening to an overplayed song. You probably feel exhausted when you hear "Rolling in the Deep" or "Somebody that I Used to Know" or some other song you've heard literally hundreds of times in the past few months- the song becomes dull as you feel like you can predict the next notes, as the exciting or emotional moments lose their sense of surprise, as you can remember the lyrics in your sleep. Well, a similar thing happens for me with the Lumineers on much earlier listens, because even if I haven't heard the song, I feel like I've heard the instrumentation, the chord changes, the general melodic outline in a number of other songs I've already listened to. (In this case, Jay Farrar's work in Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt is one clear reference point.)

Which doesn't mean there's anything wrong with liking the Lumineers, at all- other people haven't listened to the same other music in the same way, and I might very well have liked their songs better 10 years ago, when I hadn't listened to the similar music that's now saturated my musical experience. It just means that at this point in my life, I'm looking for things that sound different, or that at least do a familiar thing in a unique way- and under my definition of "familiar," the Lumineers don't work for me.

I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that the saturation principle is relevant for a lot of my fellow, so-called hipsters. (At least the ones who get the title due to actual interest in music as opposed to just being irony-obsessed and annoying to New York Times writers.) The flip side of feeling "saturated" about a band like the Lumineers is finding an eccentric, hipster-loved band like Animal Collective or Sunset Rubdown or the Flaming Lips more appealing, in large part because they do sound different. What twenty year-old hipster me didn't appreciate is that it doesn't necessarily mean that music is incontrovertibly "better," or that others were missing out by not liking it- it just means that their musical experience was different (and probably less intensive) than mine.