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Do you ever listen to an album for the first time and feel no connection to it at all? Like it just whizzes overhead, on some cultural plane beyond your grasp? Your friends might be raving about it, but all you can do is look back at them with a blank stare, like they’re speaking a different language. It’s not that you think the album is bad, it’s just that you can’t get into it. You try listening to it twice and maybe even a third time, and you start to feel more and more frustrated. Stupid, even. You may ask yourself, “What is everyone else seeing here that I’m missing completely?” But even reading verbose five-star reviews praising the album for its conceptual genius or it’s visceral beauty can’t help you understand the attraction. You think about deleting it from your iTunes library out of spite, but something nagging tells you to keep it around.
Time passes by. Months, or even years, and then one day you wake up with a song from this album stuck in your head. It’s 4:30 AM. You take an aching shower and get dressed without realizing it, and you’re sitting in your Geo Metro in the buzzing, velvet moments before morning starts, trying to decide what to play on your drive to work. The Los Angeles freeways are eerily vacant, and the only drivers on the road are begrudgingly reserved compared to the flashy type of driving you’ve come to expect from the city. Today, maybe, you’re going to be an extra in the unnecessary cgi/live action remake of a childhood classic, and you’re just barely dangling on to your consciousness. And then it hits you. You have a strong urge to listen to that unsettling album– just when everyone else seems to have forgotten about it– and in this unexpectedly quiet moment, it finally seems to make sense. Alvin and the Chipmunks hot-wired my love for Daft Punk.
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that video is super creepy…
who raved about it? all i heard was rants.
this album disappointed everyone, including me for a little while. but at least i liked it. even then i felt pretty dumb for it because it was basically called the biggest letdown ever.
UNTIL COACHELLA HAPPENED. HAHAHAHA.
all of a sudden ‘brainwasher’ got epic.
(seriously though, find me a positive review that isn’t stylus’ tongue-in-cheek backhand compliment)
I don’t know, I guess it did get a lot of bad reviews but I feel like there were many rabid fans of it as well. I was into “Technologic” and nothing else on the record when I first heard it, but now I like the whole thing.
In general terms though, does that ever happen to you? A sudden sense of understanding towards an album you never connected with.
Whoz yr favorite chipmunk? I must know!
I know you want me to say Simon, but it’s Theodore ;)
that’s how i loved my favorite band, Underworld.
i was visiting france and only packed some random cds, and to my dismay found that one of them was their second album ’second toughest in the infants’. it had jsut finished raining and i was going down a stone path to see my friend so i decided to put it on just because i’d exhausted most of my other cds. it turned out beautifully. it was rough, wet nature with long expanses of rolling hils on either side. and then i had all these soft pads and bass-dominant beats that created a very vivid and wonderful setting to all of it. it had been a year since i bought that album, and it had finally ‘clicked’
then more recently the same thing happened to a lesser extent with The Books when i went to Canada.
well, i responded, but yr comments section seems a little screwed up :(