For my review today, a little reminder – to myself.
When it came to my fifteen or so years writing for the All Music Guide, I heard…a LOT of stuff. Apparently something like at least 6000 reviews, according to a friend who works there full time. A fair amount of it was for bands that I either regularly listened to or kept coming back to, if the review was the way I was introduced to them. But a lot of it was a case where I’d be introduced to a band’s work (via promo, reading up on them or whatever else), give my best assessment of what I was hearing, hoping like hell I made some kind of sense and then, in many cases, just never listening to them again.
But this was of course simply because here I was with yet ANOTHER batch of albums to review for the AMG soon if not other locations as well and etc. etc. – the churn is what a few friends of mine have called it these days. And if it was always there to some degree, the last fifteen years have just seen it grow beyond belief, with me going from “Well this used disc I picked up seems interesting, wonder if anyone’s covered it” to “…wait, how many streams was I sent today?" These are the kind of complaints you want to have, I assure you, but even so, it’s a little daunting.
I’d reviewed Sister Crayon’s Bellow album two years ago for the AMG and quite honestly I don’t remember a thing about it – the only way I do remember I did that was because I had to Google the review. I did remember doing the review but that was about it; I certainly don’t consciously remember listening to the album again after I’d completed my review. Based on the sound of what I was going on about, it could stand a relisten, it seems; I try not to drop names of reference points like Long Fin Killie lightly. But in listening to this, one of their new songs from a forthcoming EP, I was essentially starting over cold.
But that can be helpful – it’s a way to defeat certain preconceptions, albeit in slightly embarrassed fashion. It’d be lovely to immediately recall the older work to mind (and a lot of it is there on the SoundCloud page anyway), so while I was interested to hear the new music by all means, I felt a little goofy nonetheless. If nothing else, I had to see if my praise was just a little hot air on my end – I’d noticed something worthy of praise, so does the new music match the memories in this case?
I’d say it does here, in its own quick skittering fashion (which is probably what made me think a bit of LFK in the first place, but not only that). The appeal of being simultaneously moody and wired up is not always easy to pull off in music, and if the combination is a touch familiar in its elements, it works as a whole. Also, that’s a great vocal line from Terra Lopez on the chorus, and the way she works against the steady keyboard (?) chime at that point in particular completely sells the moment. You get a sense that something was building up to the break and then all of a sudden did just that, with a well placed pause or two and a way to make the quiet introduction of a bass part one hell of a statement.
So yeah, my judgment stands, happily, and I’m glad of that.
(Source: SoundCloud / Sister Crayon)
