New music

A couple of weeks ago I was at a friends birthday party. Happy 30th Meg. While there I was bemoaning the lack of new music that didn't suck. I managed to run into someone who had their own radio show. I think her name is Amy, I think she was from Chicago, my recollection of the evening is a little fuzzy. Hi Amy. Amy took me under her wing, and made me a list of albums that I just had to get. There was one on her list, that I bet if there was a music store open at that hour, she would have drug me from the party and made me buy it right then and there. I've finally got to the point where I had time and give these bands a listen. I have to admit to being a little disappointed.

I learned a little trick from a friend of mine who owns a record store, and has a pretty eclectic taste in music. He claims that you can usually judge how good an album is going to sound by listening to the first 30 seconds of every track on an album. Yeah, I know this totally panders to the short attention span mentality of our world, but it really seems to work. Unfortunately none of her suggestions seem to pass the test. The first three bands Metric, Palomar and Hong Kong all sounded like their singer was a weak imitation of Debbie Harry from Blondie. They all had the same high, indistinctly angelic voice with not much to differentiate one song from the next. Hong Kong seemed to grate on my nerves the least, simply because the music had some differentiation from the mushy guitar/drums/vocals combination that they all seemed to have.

The last band, Broken Social Scene, kept my attention for slightly longer. At least their songs pass the 30 second test. I'm not saying that they are the next Beatles, but I managed to listen to their entire album without wanting to quickly track skip to find out if there were any better songs on the albums. They also seemed to mix it up a bit. All of the songs don't sound the same, while obviously coming from the same artist. Wait do I hear a banjo? Interesting. What have they done to this persons voice? Wow that sounds weird. I guess I have inherited my generation's short attention span. I really need some variety, something that grabs my attention.

OK, so then I went out and bought a couple of mainstream albums. The brand spanking new U2, and last years Ween. Once again I'm less than impressed with the new albums. U2 has so much potential, but this album just didn't seem to hit it. There are a couple of songs on there that grabbed my attention, but the rest seemed to meander about without much in the way of melody or direction. Oh well. Ween (one of my favorite bands) is always kind of a hit or miss affair. Some of their albums are insanely awesome, others are like "oh well, there are a few good tracks". The Mollusk is an insanely awesome album. Definitely in my top 5 albums of all time. Yeah I'm weird like that. Quebec, the album I just bought is just OK. Not bad mind you, but definitely not their best.