Pearly Gates Music and How We Get to the Music We Like
We get a lot of crap music sent to us at work. A co-worker and I have come to the conclusion that is more than fair to decide whether or not to give a new artist a listen based on the quality of their cover art. 90 percent of the time, it is the perfect indicator of how good the music is - though I guess I would have to make a caveat for someone like White Williams:
But there are a few cds that I’m always willing to give a listen to based on what company sent it to me - arts and crafts, barsuk, shorefiremedia, Mute, Biz 3, nastylittleman and a few others I’m forgetting. Thankfully Pearly Gate Music didn’t get by me because it came from Barsuk.
It’s just one guy, Zach Tillman, who recorded his album in his house. He actually reminds me of a few bands I don’t even like. Namely, Okkervil River. I find that guy’s voice too whiny and sometimes, even though I’m not a huge lyric person, his words are too dumb to ignore and still enjoy the music. I wouldn’t say Tillman’s lyrics are always brilliant (and again, I’m not really a person who studies lyrics) but there’s some quality to what he does that has been addictive to me.
Take for example the song I’ve attached here, called “Gossamer Hair” - at first glance the word ‘gossamer’ alone is completely off-putting to me. Aren’t we clever using our thesaurus. The number of times he says it in the song should further annoy me, but it doesn’t at all. Neither does the blaring change in tone mid-song. On paper, I should hate this song and I still don’t understand why I don’t.
But I guess that’s why music writing is sometimes complete bullshit. You can’t try to apply hard and fast criteria for ‘quality.’ Pitchfork’s empirical formula of rating discs from a scale of 1 to 10 and allowing for decimal points always aggravates me. So Janelle Monae’s new album gets an 8.5 but Sleigh Bells is .2 better with an 8.7? Tell me why that is. Tell where the two-tenths better really comes from.
Over the course of interviewing several indie bands, I usually end up mentioning what Pitchfork has given them as a rating. Even if it’s a good number they’ve gotten, most musicians are completely soured on that site’s dominance as a tastemaker, as the only bellwether that an entire subsection of the music industry uses to vet or deny an artist. As much as the Internet allows for so many opinions, we still seem to need to have one big filter, one touchstone to turn to. And I admit, I read it all the time. What a stupid lamb.
