Cruel Britannia

Jarvis has an excellent solo album out. Damon is going strong with Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad, & The Queen. Brett is gearing up for his first solo album. The Gallagher brothers are...well, I have no idea and I don't much care.

And Luke Haines is popping up in comic books. If you read comics and care at all about Britpop, you should check out Phonogram. I still can't suss out the story, but it's definitely a love letter to the scene. Luke figures prominently in the latest issue, and I'll just leave it at that. The upshot of all this (nostalgia) is that I couldn't understand why I never got into The Auteurs. They're just one of those bands that just passed me by, or I passed them by. I do remember the reviews and praise and have always been aware that their albums are well thought of. I also enjoy Black Box Recorder.

Now that I've listened to New Wave a couple of times I can easily understand how Haines ended up marginalized and tagged as a pop underachiever. The album is stunning, both musically and lyrically. I'm not sure if it's really Britpop, outside of being released during that period. It sounds a bit like Suede I guess; the glam is there, but toned way down. I can't imagine this stuff pumping out of radios along with Oasis and Blur. In retrospect, it feels obvious that New Wave lost the Mercury Prize to Suede's debut. This music is bone dry and more than a little caustic. The melodies are subtle and the hooks subdued; it doesn't want to make easy friends with you.

This has got me thinking about what makes a great debut album. Listening to New Wave it's amazing to think it's someone's debut. It's clear that Haines had a very specific vision for the album, and it sounds like he nailed it completely. I don't know how else to explain it other than to say the album fully realises a unique world with its own mood. I think people latch onto debut records when it feels like the band popped into this world fully formed, seemingly out of nowhere. This is the kind of band fans form mini cults around. The music has its own "thing." That thing is probably a "place" where you go when you listen to the music. If a band can't conjure a place like that, you can enjoy their music, but only ever at a distance.

Not Classic Masterpieces

Have you ever had albums you feel sorry for, as if they were children or friends that have been unjustly picked on? For me, these usually take the form of albums that aren't the artist's best work, or considered classics, but just albums that I think have a bum rap for some reason. I thinking about this while listening to Roxy Music's Flesh + Blood the other day. Here's an album that gets little respect, being sandwiched between the group's influential Glam records and the commercial success of Avalon. It's either not as good as the latter, or not as important as the former. But taken on its own terms, I like it. Flesh + Blood makes sense if you believe that New Romantic grew almost directly out of Glam. In that sense, the album sounds like a natural step and maybe more influential than people think, with its disco beats and synthesizers. Hell, I don't even mind the cover songs. I'm not saying the album is perfect; the first half is definitely stronger than the second. But try to love it at least a little.

Then I had these thoughts again yesterday listening to Lush's Lovelife. Did this album piss off a lot of people because it wasn't Shoegaze enough? Or did people feel like they were jumping on the Brit Pop bandwagon? Personally, I love the fact that they changed their sound. I'll admit Lovelife didn't exactly stake out new musical territory, and it's certainly not the best Brit Pop album ever, but it features several fine pop songs and at least they tried something different. Again, I'm not saying this album is some masterpiece, but I think it's better than most people give it credit for.

I feel like there's this thing where if an album isn't a 10 out of 10, then history has no room for it. God forbid you make an album that's merely very good, or even just good. Maybe it's because there's this constant flood of music to deal with, so through some Darwinian process only the strongest survive the flood. Try to give a little extra time to the lonely children floating just out of camera view.