I'm all for weird, off the wall music. Just left of mainstream, you know? Things like the eels or Belle & Sebastian. Not right out there with the indie garage band chasers, but certainly not your run of the mill top 40 junk or even regular rock stuff... just a little bit unusual.
I've started getting into The White Stripes lately. I like the whole lo-fi, stripped down sound; the intensity and the proximity of the music. It's very raw, live on a record. It's offbeat and unusual and passionate... It's quite exciting.
Yet, I have to say that The Nurse, track 2 on their second-to-latest album, Get Behind Me Satan, is about the most self-indulgent masturbatory bit of rubbish I've ever heard on an album, and I speak as someone who enjoyed both Kid A and Amnesiac by Radiohead, pretty much in their entirety. What possessed them to put this track on their album is beyond me... There's a marimba, but it's clearly only there because Jack had bought a marimba and wanted to try it out, and there's a guitar, but it's so out of time, probably because Jack is trying to put down his marimba-bashers in time to get to the frets, and the drums are hideously off-kilter, but not in a clever, syncopated way or a wacky 7/8 time signature way, but in a quite-simply-hopelessly-out-of-time fashion.
It's offensive that a band would put such a crummy track on an album. I'm sure that the muso's will pick over how clever and unconventional it is, and how revolutionary this sort of thing is. It's not, it's just rubbish. It's like that dude who recorded an entire album of silence, or the track that was nothing but someone breathing, or the 9 minute track of guitar feedback that the Grateful dead once recorded, as I was today informed by a 50-something Beefheart/Zappa loving colleague at work.
It’s just pretentious. It’s the modern art of the music world.
Here endeth the rant.
