"can i show you a cool band?" yes absolutely
Hello and happy Tuesday to you all. Last December my parents gave me the Christmas gift of a print subscription to The New Yorker, which I now read at night as a dual exercise in Knowing What's Going On and also Putting My Phone Away. And last night I read a big piece about the battle currently pitched between the A.I. doomers who think A.I. is going to kill us and the effective accelerationist movement that's cool with A.I. ruling the world. Some of the figures in that zone came up through...blogging. There's apparently a whole scene of "rationalist bloggers." Anyway, I don't really know whether A.I. will ruin our lives, but it's interesting that in 2024, you can still blog your way into a feature in The New Yorker. #manifesting #that #for #IEnjoyMusic
The more I blog for I Enjoy Music, the more I think I'm narrowing down the focus and theme of the blog, which is 'musical connectivity', 'music interactions', 'music in real life', that kind of thing. I have written album reviews before, when I was very young and had an idea that I was participating in some kind of objective truth about art, and all of those reviews were godawful. Criticism has never been my strong suit. What I care about is the moment where music and people meet.
There's a big oral history of Pitchfork in Slate today, which I read in bed before getting up, because living on Pacific Time is humbling and rude. It was honestly so large and sprawling that it was hard to pull a singular 'take' from the whole thing, but I keep thinking about something that keeps falling through the cracks in all these real-time eulogies of Pitchfork (a site that is still alive, just to be clear!): people liked Pitchfork so much at the beginning because it had a specific vibe, and the vibe was exuberant and snobby and sometimes very mean. That was the gas that powered Pitchfork.
The site claimed authority for itself through a specific editorial voice; as former Pitchfork co-owner Chris Kaskie was quoted in the piece, "We are not trying to be everything to everybody. We’re trying to be something to someone." And I do think Pitchfork's version of being "something to someone" wasn't the most constructive force out there, and it did need to evolve to fit into a wider and more inclusive internet. But if I'm to find anything instructive about Pitchfork's massive turn-of-the-'00s success, I'm looking at their specificity...
Here on I Enjoy Music, I'm not trying to be an asshole about music, because that's not my lane. I'm just trying to vibe. Which leads me to this small tale...
A few weeks ago, someone DM'd the I Enjoy Music instagram and recommended a band to me. I didn't know this person, and the person didn't even know the band personally. It wasn't a pitch, just a recommendation: "can i show you a cool band?" The band was Green Eyes, Witch Hands, an experimental indie band from Canada with two brothers (William and Nicholas Morrison, according to this interview with East Coast DNA) at its core.
I listened to their most recent album, Witch Hands. The first song, "With My Head on Your Head," melted from mellow acoustic folk into a snappy form of MySpace pop, unfurling in a way that had me smiling like a sentimental fool by the end. I've seen a few "hyperpop is dead" takes in the recent past, but I think the coolest thing to occur in the wake of peak hyperpop is this particular style of genre smash, an approach to music that doesn't adhere to any particular conventions other than "this sounds the way I want it to sound."
Bandcamp Album of the Day Apr 29, 2020
The whole album is excellent. Green Eyes, Witch Hands clearly have an ear for hooks, and I love their production, which melds crunchy programmed drums with moody guitar, and adds digital manipulation that feels lovingly crafted—sensitive and precise. Likewise their lyrics, which are often short and oblique, leave some room for interpretation that's welcome in this current hyperliteral moment. "Built you a church / Somewhere to rest / No need to thank me / Just go on and bless me," they sing on the soft strummer "Welcome Home." Is this church-building a show of real devotion, or is there more at play??
I asked the guy who rec'd the band to me how they found Green Eyes, Witch Hands in the first place, and it turned out it was a sort of digital accident—they were looking for music from Green!Eyes, a band from Taiwan whose music is no longer on Spotify.
How magical is that? Now I have two new bands to listen to, all because someone reached out with a rec. That's wonderful. That moment of reach-out is what I'm trying to immortalize and celebrate on the blog. Hyperlink and build... 🪄
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