Thursday 28 February 2013

The Thrill is Gone?

  • Reflections on whether we can grow out of musical puppy love. 

This month I've been listening to Foals' new album, Holy Fire. It's a good listen. They show some balls that have previously been hidden. Other times they just embrace the rhythm to corny-as-hell-but-enjoyable effect. Unfortunately the second half just dies. Slowly.

The new album wasn't what interested me, though. Not really. Listening to the band's latest album led me back to listening to their first. Antidotes came out in 2008, towards the time I was finishing high school. I fell in love with the album. At the time it really felt like I was experiencing something unlike anything I'd heard before. The spacy, cryptic songs inspired some part of my imagination that struck a chord with me and where I was at the time. In hindsight, I of course realise that songs like Hummer (which didn't in fact make the final album) and Cassius really are as obnoxious as my friends at the time pointed out. They belong as the soundtrack to terrible high school parties dubbed "raves" or "Skins parties" by high school girls with too much money and not enough imagination. Nonetheless, it remains the case that I can only describe the feeling that listening to that album again conjured up as something close to love. Something hard to put into words.

This in turn moved me to think of music more broadly. I began to wonder if I'd felt that feeling since. Certainly I can remember it clearly as a teenager. When I first heard the technical prowess of Funeral for a Friend's Hours, or when Bloc Party's Silent Alarm rescued me from emo I was enamoured. The Xcerts' debut, In the Cold Wind We Smile, with its mix of power pop perfection and reflective lyrics hit me pretty hard in the summer I left school, as I was waiting to begin university. Looking back at the music I've discovered since coming to university, however, I realise that examples of such album affection are few and far between. I suppose that Johnny Marr's guitar work on Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank came close. Titus Andronicus's The Monitor was pretty important for me a few months ago. I wrote pretty extensively about it at the time. For all that I truly enjoyed albums such as these, I just don't know if I've been caught up and smitten in the same way I was with Antidotes

Maybe as we get older we get more cynical. Maybe we just hear too much: perhaps music ceases to surprise us. Whilst my desire to seek out new music absolutely hasn't waned, I hope that I'll fall in love with albums again. The comparisons to love and the repeat references to high school might however provide a source of optimism. I used to think that I would never feel again what I felt for my first girlfriend. It wasn't that I hadn't had strong feelings for other girls, but the thrill was gone. Nonetheless, I've since been proven wrong. I hope that I'm proven wrong about music, too.