Wire reviews

Listening to:
Rilo Kiley
The Bouncing Souls

Taking a knitting break for the day

On the wire as a whole:

An interesting magazine dedicated to all things obscure. I liked it although I won’t lie there are some articles that I didn’t get into. The articles are descriptive and offer just enough back-story to make the artist intriguing. What the wire doesn’t really do is give much description of the music that is being written about. This makes me more interested in hearing the music. Using terms like “punked up jazz” “veers unpredictably between a drunken lurch and a frenzied lunge” (both from the Review of Death Sentence: Panda! Puppy, Kitty or Both . . . in the August 2005 issue of Wire) does not tell me what kind of instruments they have or what band influences their sound, it makes me want to listen to their fast, vicious and loud music.
Another review that I enjoyed was the New Humans self titled album. It mentions that the New Humans straddle the line of art and rock. I can understand indie/art rock ish type music, but I don’t think this is the line they are talking about. We watched the movie from the worlds fair and also the film of from last class. I think that that is more the vein that the New Humans fall into. Their music, if the review is to be believed recalls the world of visual art. Talking about a “cacophony repeated with accelerating hysteria until it blurs into an abstract wall of sound” that music could be strong enough to evoke a visual reaction is not a new idea, we’ve encountered it in readings by Edgard Varese (“The Liberation of Sound”). They saw music as happening on more than one plane, in the future you could experience music when colors appeared with sounds. While the colors are not appearing, it seems as though the New Humans is creating in our minds what modernist/futurist composers in the early twentieth century wished to create on stage.