Veckatimest, Taste, Expectations, Criticism
I’ve been thinking about Grizzly Bear’s new record Veckatimest. I also have been listening to it. And I have been thinking about what I think about it, in that very meta- way that I sometimes do. And there are all of these other thoughts that sprout out from these thoughts. They are like tendrils or green shoots or little roots and they go off in a myriad of directions. There are a couple of them and, again, the act of stating them gives rise to other questions and then at the root of all these questions is perhaps God or something. I don’t know.
[ed note: keep reading if you want but this one's kinda long]
Here’s one question: What does it mean to have good taste? And is it even possible to think you have bad taste and really mean it?
Here’s another question: Should an artist that creates be offering criticism of another artist that creates and how does that impact their potential relationships with those artists?
Here’s another question: What is the role of the critic? Is it important? To what extent do we need criticism at all or do we just need aspirational recommendations without the other side of things (the negative)?
Here’s another question: How do all of these factors play with and conform to various expectations and how do they operate in the context of a group? I.e. How does your awareness that you’re supposed to like something affect your ability to actually like it?
And the last question: So what do you think of the album?
PS Question: Is it worth writing about music at all in the first place? Words hardly capture the experience of listening so what exactly is the role of explaining music in the context of words? Maybe rambling meandering essays on the context around listening to music (like these open-ended questions) are perhaps the true nature of music criticism and not so much the actual description of the songs?
PPS Question: How does it feel to explore some of these questions so innocently and with such seeming sincerity with the full knowledge that most of them have already been thoroughly dissected by philosophers and academics and it’s just that you haven’t read much about it?
For most of these questions, I don’t really have the answers. Here are some thoughts though:
On Taste and Criticism
I keep thinking about that scene in When Harry Met Sally where Carrie Fisher says, “Everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor but they can’t all can they?” (Or something to that effect) [ed note: add good driver to that list] So what does it mean to have good taste and how or why would anyone ever think they didn’t have good taste? I suppose some of this relates to more ancient ruminations on quality itself. And, of course, taste is subjective to some extent and is formed by other kinds of impressions. What kinds of things you experienced as you developed and the impact of those experiences on your psyche, etc.
And, yet, we know and trust that there are some kinds of standards and we bequeath the moderation of those standards to certain trusted scions. So, clearly, there does seem to be some consensus around what things are indeed good and what things aren’t.
And we do know that we need people to help sort through the noise and give an opinion and make proclamations even if we are the all-too-often (perhaps undeserving) recipients of these proclamations or, more often, the absence of said proclamations.
All of this is in the context of taste-makers and critics like Rolling Stone, Spin or, perhaps most importantly for this kind of music, Pitchfork. What do their scores mean? What does it mean if I disagree with them? Is it meaningful to ask the question, “Do I have good taste?” or is it totally irrelevant and merely the reflection of my own transparent insecurities.
Of course, I think I have good taste. That’s one thing I do think. But my taste is about pop in some strange way and that doesn’t always lend itself. And when I mean pop I suppose I mean short, concise, terse, direct, and then also shaded but leaning towards the brightly lit and then shaded on the margin. For example, the movie “Fargo” which is short, direct, but then layered, and also very human, but those things are on the edges and in the colors and the way the camera lingers and not specifically the point but sort all these colorful and human shadings around the brightly lit murder mystery. That’s what my taste is.
Is that good? Who knows. It’s hard to say.
Artist-Critics
More difficult is the concept of me as an artist commenting on the quality of a specific recording. Obvious questions and thought tendrils spring out from the very fact, and indeed from the comments of any critic. Most often they can be summarized as “Who are you to comment, you couldn’t do any better” and that’s particularly true when I probably tend to agree with them, at least about Grizzly Bear.
If you can’t say something nice, why say anything at all? That’s what some people say and, I suppose, even though there are some people out there that have equated me to two famous musical acts and then thrown feces into the mix, I do think that if we’re going to agree that criticism is valuable and honorable in its own right than we must acknowledge the importance of constructive and critical criticism, meaning negative thoughts.
It’s kind of weird to even think about writing criticism for bands I know well. I don’t know the guys in Grizzly Bear well but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that I’d run into them at some point and that in itself would be strange if I had just publicly remarked that I wasn’t too fond of their record. I suppose that’s the nature of blogging and public channels in general. But I think it’s complicated by the act of creating art and trying to have it both ways. Trying to be both a critic and pundit of the popular landscape and then trying to contribute to that landscape as well. Most artists reserve much of their real thoughts for private consumption and either don’t comment at all in a public forum or withhold authentic reactions.
That’s why you’ll find so many cheerful greetings in the course of communication between artists. There’s so much negative feedback provided by the world itself, through the mere fact that most of what you create is completely ignored, it seems unnecessary and mean-spirited to actively contribute to a dialogue about art publicly. But maybe that code is alleviated for a major band like Grizzly Bear because of the very fact that they have become so well known. There’s a certain baseline public awareness that’s been breached and perhaps it’s more acceptable to offer up some honest candid feedback given it’s all out in the open anyway and part of a broader conversation.
Stop Hedging and Tell Us What You Think
All that notwithstanding, and given the fact that there’s tremendous pressure to either fully embrace the album because everyone else is doing it or completely reject the album, again because everyone else is doing it, I have my own thoughts. In general, I think the album is very good. It’s almost always interesting, fairly enjoyable and occasionally not.
The arrangements and the songs are fairly strong. There are a number of moments throughout the record that beg for further examination and further listening. Those little moments are what make the record for me. Little snippets of melody, little phrases, little moments that blossom and bloom only after a few subsequent audiences. On the first tune, “Southern Point” it’s the little keyboard riff that comes pounding in with the drums towards the end of the song. Elsewhere it’s the marching drums coming in the second half of the chorus of “All We Ask”. The second part/chorus of “Ready, Able” Frankly, there are too many to comment on.
As others have remarked, what you really feel when you’re listening to the record is the sense that these guys are truly a collective, a band. They’ve come together and contributed to these songs and all of them have lent their muscles and their powers where they could. As a result, there are a lot of highlights and magic moments. And again, there are little strains of unexpected melody that you’ll find yourself humming when you hadn’t thought anything stuck from a specific moment. These melodies are sly and meandering and clever and not always obvious and lying just on the surface like a lily pad.
There are two principal drawbacks to the record. One is the pacing and tempo. The whole thing is mid-tempo and I’ve consistenly found it hard to listen to the whole thing start to finish. I end up petering out around “I Live With You”, the 11th song. I know that’s some people’s favorite but it hasn’t been able to stick with me, usually because I force myself to start at the beginning and I lose patience after awhile. I actually don’t think that’s the biggest drawback. More of a smaller concern actually. But, to points I have made earlier, I think we need to think about shortening records. That’s just me though.
The real concern and the question mark for me are the vocals. I don’t think they always work and on some of the songs (like “Dory” or the aforementioned “I Live With You”) I’m simply not in the mood to listen to them. The harmonies are interesting and I get that they’re “good” in some way but I don’t always actually enjoy the experience of hearing them. Some people call them haunting, particularly on the song “Dory” but in a bad way my mind hears haunting and goes to the Disney version of “Sleepy Hollow” or something. They occasionally sound like the soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz or something and, again, back to the question of taste, I’m not always in the mood to say that that is good but I feel self-conscious when I admit as much.
Throughout the record, much of the playing is muscular and vigorous, but I simply don’t find the singing similarly vigorous and that hampers my abilility to enjoy everything. Vocals are such a tricky question. And I find this high-harmony upper-register trend kind of strange and kind of funny but also advantageous because I sing in a lower register. But, comparing Grizzly Bear to Fleet Foxes, for example, leaves me thinking that there is something more rugged with Fleet Foxes and, for whatever reason again relating to my upbringing and all the tress I have chopped, etc., I am drawn to the more organic sounds I hear from Fleet Foxes than Grizzly Bear.
So that’s all a really long and measured way of saying that there are some tunes where I get kind of bored and don’t really appreciate the singing but that overall I recognize that all of it is interesting and there are some songs that I really enjoy quite a bit, I must say.
Perhaps my favorite is “Cheerleader”. It has a bounciness and a groove that overcomes the tempo. The dynamics are strong. And here the singing works perfectly. Writing about music is kind of weird but I think of the words ‘spidery’ and ‘slinky’ when I think of this tune. And it feels like it conjures the best of the 50s and the rock tradition, the best of those comparisons to the Spector-produced Wall of Sound. Like something by The Supremes but through the looking glass and cracked and splayed out. This is a song that is haunting in the good haunting way and not in the bad kinda Disney way.
The bottom line is that these are some great musicians (especially Chris Bear, the drummer) and they have really interesting songs. And some of the songs you don’t think you like at first have a way of burrowing their way into your brain but it doesn’t always work for me but I acknowledge that it’s possible that my opinion may not count for much and whose opinion does and how are all our opinions shaped by the fact that we know what they are supposed to be and perhaps that relates to something about Heisenberg and that the act of observing something changes it so that there is really no truth because everything is a reaction against itself.
What can I say? It’s confusing.
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