I was reading this blurb about the latest Sore Eros album while listening to the actual record.
Check out this couple of sentences: Indeed, the side-long ending track, “Mirror,” feels like it’s equally indebted to left-coast canyon-hugging surf-pop and cheese steak-powered garage-volk readymades. The rest of the album is just as sizzling.
I guess “sizzling” means “hot,” and then that said debt is “good.” But reading it inspired me to take another stab at what’s hidden in ontological plain sight, because iIf anything is an exercise that will take you deep into an ontological wormhole, it’s rock music journalism.
The United States and England in particular has a history of impenetrable layers of reference that can be confusing, exhausting and interminable even to fans of it. For this exercise I doubt there will be any need to know anything about the artists, styles and genres I’m referring to, just that, to some people (for example, me) this incredible reference soup actually makes perfect sense and is clear and straightforward.
The writer, Byron Coley, is somewhat of a legend in some circles, including where the band is from, the label they’re on, and they all live in the same community as well. So we’re starting with yet more associations before we’ve read anything, or at least the ones who would get it (again, me, ymmv). And as is traditional in pop music going back to the earliest recordings, there are associations with drugs and alcohol implicit in the style, and probably the lyrics, which I haven’t listened closely to yet.
The review itself is 240 words. At a glance, here’s a list of the references that are obvious to me, 30 in all, comprising an incredible 109 words. That approaches half of the review!
Rural psych
Western Mass
Fried
Adam Granduciel (The War on Drugs)
Daniel Oxenberg (ex-Supreme Dicks)
Kurt Vile (ex-Nest of Saws)
Philly
LA
the side-long ending track
side-long ending track
left-coast
canyon-hugging
surf-pop
cheese steak-powered
garage-
Volk
Readymades
large-scale rock moves
with Deadly intent
strangely-drifting pop aktion
Bobb Trimble
Heft
more woodsy than beachy
but maybe I’m just saying that ’cause I’m listening to the thing in the middle of a forest
Pressed at 45 RPM
for extra high fidelity,
packed up with a poster insert you can throw darts at (just like an earlier generation threw darts at the insert from the first Silver Apples LP)
Swan song
head
Truth be told, I don’t actually understand a couple of these – garage- is a genre, and volk is German for “folk”… hypenating genres is a-ok, but I have no idea what garage-volk is. Same with the “strangely-drifting pop aktion.” The only thing I find searching the web is a Kiwanis club group for disabled folks and try as I might I can’t connect anything there.
But coming back to our original excerpt, I can decode everything in there:
Indeed, the side-long ending track, “Mirror,” feels like it’s equally indebted to left-coast canyon-hugging surf-pop and cheese steak-powered garage-volk readymades. The rest of the album is just as sizzling.
Side-long: many psychedelic rock bands record long songs intended to fill an entire vinyl lp side, often with studio experiments and sound effects, intended for listening on headphones.
Left-coast: West coast, especially California, destination of counterculture hippies and anti-Vietnam war commune-goers, where the first psychedelic music bands became popular.
Canyon-hugging surf-pop: The Beach Boys, originally a “surf pop” band, lived in Laurel Canyon, and are widely regarded as one of the most accomplished studio musicians of the era, with many regarding their Pet Sounds lp as a masterpiece of both pop and psychedelia. “Surf-pop” is a short lived early 60s pop genre featuring simple songs about surfing and cars. Possibly the first lifestyle marketing targeting teenagers. Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, a favorite destination for 60s counterculture music types (see the Mamas and the Papas’ Twelve-Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming To The Canyon).
Cheese steak: sandwich originating in Philadelphia.
Garage-volk: Garage rock is typified by an obstinate amateurishness, with emphasis on feeling and performance energy.
Readymade: Modern art composed of common goods taken out of their intended context, popularized by Marcel DuChamp.
Sizzling: Hot, as in good, as in all of the above is a good thing!
It might be helpful to know if you haven’t guessed already this band and this style of music in general are of marginal appeal. I mean, I’m into it. I think it’s great. 200 copies of this album were pressed, and almost certainly if all of them are sold the band and the label will roughly break even and recoup their recording and production costs.
What interests me here is how what Coley says about this album (and I guess, himself, and his reader) makes it into something concrete when it’s very much not so, compared to rock and pop music generally. If you didn’t get any of the references, would you be curious, or have lost interest? If you got a few of the non-independent-music-record-collector-subculture references, would that have helped? Is it supposed to get my attention, and not someone else’s, yours, say, and to turn off yet another?
If you’ve never heard of this band – and as a person into this type of marginal music, I hadn’t heard of them before this release, their 8th or 9th – would you have gotten an idea of what this album might sound like, or whether it appealed to you from reading Coley’s spiel?