By Ian Cory
Dear Vinc2,
Thank you for getting in touch! I’m glad to hear that you
read my Eluvium review and thought highly enough of it to send your own music
in for similar treatment. As someone relatively new to the music criticism game
(I’m just now entering my second year) I’m still very flattered every time a
musician reaches out to me for my thoughts on their work. Of course, as a musician
myself, I understand that there’s a bit more of a cynical side to the self
promotion game, but I’d like to continue this review under the assumption that
there is a degree of mutual respect and interest in each other’s work. Also,
I’d like to apologize for being so late to the draw on this. According to your
bandcamp By The Third Sea was
released in September and it is now January. This means that the hype-building
period and my chance to be timely with my content have long since passed us by.
Again, I’m sorry. However, it seems like I won’t look too behind the times for
writing about By The Third Sea, as no
one else has written about it in any real capacity. In fact, the only writing I
could find about your music other than your own was a single sentence on a
photography blog four pages deep into google. I don’t bring this up to belittle
you, after all everyone starts somewhere and I’m certainly not racking up all
that many hits myself, but to make a larger point about why I’m having trouble
writing about your album.
I believe
there are two fundamental approaches to music criticism. On one side there is
the impulse to introduce new music to listeners, to expand horizons, to
essentially act as journalists breaking new content. These critics tend to go
to a lot of local shows, scroll deep into bandcamp and keep their ears to
ground. The other approach is to analyze and discuss music that readers are
already aware of and make them see it in a different light. This isn’t so
much of a dividing line as a continuum; plenty of writers do both, sometimes
within the same review, because ultimately the intent is the same: to reveal
something new to the reader, either in the unknown or the familiar. That said,
if I were to place myself in one camp or the other, I would probably fall into
the latter. I like to think about why people feel the way they do about
established or rising artists. I like challenging misconceptions, or exploring
how an album fits into a larger context. And here’s where I’ve been having trouble
with By The Third Sea. All I really
have to go off of for this album is your email, your bandcamp, and that cover
of a Sigur Ros song on the Guitar World forum (nice job with the vocals on that
by the way).
There are
some problems with By The Third Sea
however, namely a lack in confidence in the ability of the music to speak for
itself. There are several moments on the record where found sounds and samples
are tacked on to the beginnings and ends of tracks, and while most of them are
totally benign, they are generally pretty redundant. Listeners can already tell
from the tones of the record, and the album name itself, that By The Third Sea is supposed to evoke
nature and water. Adding sounds of rain or waves crashing on a shore may make
your intentions clearer, but it does so at the risk of being too overbearing.
It’s more important in this style of music to let the listener make their own
associations instead of trying to cram your own images down their throat. And
then there’s your sampling George W Bush talking about
training Iraqi police in the otherwise dream like “Ballad In Em.” I suppose
there might be a language barrier here, but this is a completely baffling
choice. Nothing said in the sample is particularly evocative of the mood of the
track, but its also far too mundane and lacking in drama to be effective as a
contrast to the music itself.
I say all
of this not to make you feel bad for your creative decisions but to encourage
you to think harder about your work, and in doing so, improve it. I think
you’ve got a great ear for tones and a strong sense of melody, you just need to
learn to have faith in your own music, and maybe work on stepping outside of
the shadow of your influences. I’m legitimately curious to see what you release
from here on out, so be sure to keep in touch.
Thanks again,
Ian Cory
Grade: C+
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