A personality that I've recently latched onto and annoy Rebecca with is my disdain for streaming playlists. With music streaming services now dominating our music listening habits, I've found it interesting that most people I know have gravitated to curated playlists as their primary way that they consume music. It's interesting to me because that is so foreign to me. I vastly prefer listening to full albums, because I find that more satisfying as an experience, and I rarely get fixated on a single song. The idea of regularly listening to a playlist that is either auto-generated by an algorithm or made by someone I don't know, whose taste I know nothing about, is crazy to me and not at all appealing to me.
I don't think it's unfair that I think about music more than the average person. I have a pretty calculated way that I approach listening and I've found that doing so tends to reward me with stuff that I really like.* Part of this is that, like I said, I listen primarily to full albums. I think an album is a big artistic project and they are generally made to be consumed that way, in full. I know that this isn't a great, 1 for 1, comparison, but to some degree, picking out one song and listening to that without understanding the context of a full album is a little bit like only looking a one well-painted cloud in a painting. There's a lot that you're missing!
*We have officially reached rock bottom at IMU and this is the most douchebag thing I've ever written. There is nowhere left to go here. We have finished.
So I kind of hate streaming playlists because they deviate from that. Spotify is always trying to drive you towards listening to your daily mix or their playlists and they make it hard to just listen to a full album, often only letting listen to albums on shuffle, which I also find insane. The songs are in a tracklist for a reason? Why would I shuffle one album?
But there's also my big dumb left wing ideas for why I hold this position, as spots on playlists are now hold the prestige that radio rotation used to hold. Record labels pay for their artists to get spots on big playlists (like Punk Unleashed or Rap Caviar), so really the playlists that are presented to you on your home page are just industry plants. It's like every genre has its own version of Top 40 now and that is very strange to me, a dinosaur who would like to listen to something once through in order.
This all being said, I recently discovered an artist through a Spotify playlist, so I guess this who introduction was hypocritical and an elitist music nerd version of virtue signaling. Am I the worst? Yes. Anyway, the primary reason for this blog was to discuss that artist and I apparently needed to throw all this out there to get to this point.
I found this band Hundred Reasons through an "alternative rock" playlist that was mostly shoegaze and emo. That doesn't seem like alternative rock to me? Maybe that's a discussion for another time. Is alt-rock now just putting one flat 3rd in your chord progression and sometimes tending towards Vedder in your vocal style? Also for another time! After finding this band, I immediately checked out their album Ideas Above Our Station, which seems to be the "one".
I'm always interested in bands like this because they were so contained to a time. I was shocked that I had never heard of them, as 2002 was exactly when I was consuming rock music in all of its forms by the pound and I basically never turned off muchmusic. Like, why did I know the Exies and Trust Company (both: woof), but not Hundred Reasons?
It's maybe related to them being British, as I think 00s rock in the UK was still pretty isolated. After the Verve and Oasis, it seems like the scene in the country really retreated into itself and turned independent again. It seems like there tonnes of bands like Keane or McFly that were big Reading-and-Leeds-type deals in the UK, but were mostly relegated to being "British bands Tim knows from muchmusic" in North America. Maybe there's a lot of other Hundred Reasons. Maybe they all suck. Who knows!
Upon hearing the intro riff, I was immediately very into the song because I love both octave chords and drop D tuning. It's hard to describe, but the album hit a particular feeling that I sometimes get from new music, in which an intro song immediately seems to capture both my interest and be exactly what I was hoping from the context clues around the band. Maybe this is just me thinking about great introduction songs, because they are a particular art. A good Side A, Track 1 needs to present you with the main sound of the band and album, but not be a single or principle song on the album. It should show a lot of what the band has to offer, but hint at there being more to offer. "I'll Find You" was a fantastic introduction track.
To be honest though, I found the rest of the album a little uneven and didn't think that it lived up to what was promised by "I'll Find You". It's a weird mix of sounds and to be honest that makes me even more interested. It seems like the blueprint for the band was to make post-hardcore that had a small amount of shoegaze in the guitar work, like Hum, but they are also much poppier than Hum. I think one of the guitar also plays in an open D/C tuning, and I am a huge mark for that sort of guitar style. There's times where the vocals and guitar also veer way into the parts of alternative rock that I do not like, that I mentioned above. Weirdly, it also sometimes sounds a lot like the 3rd wave emo stuff from the early 00s that I also don't fuck with, like Finch or Story of the Year, without ever going full on into that stuff. On top of all of this, homeboy's accent also comes through in the vocals, making this mix even more strange.
Maybe "I'll Find You" is great intro track for a different record? This makes it sound like I didn't like this record, which isn't true, it just wasn't what I thought and hoped it would be. Mostly, I can't believe this band that was apparently pretty big and successful for a time were totally off my radar. This would suggest that I should give playlist creation and curation its due, but fuck that. The album was still better and I still think that shit is dumb.
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