Will Stratton – No Wonder [2009]

listen
try
buy

Maybe I have said this before somewhere, but it bears repeating: I love recorded sound for a very specific reason. Music is typically transient, ephemeral, bound by the space and time in which it occurs, but recorded music brings the illusion of permanence, and even a small degree of the real thing, while still being subjective in a way that a representative image or a sentence simply cannot.

Maybe I have said this before somewhere, but it bears repeating: I love recorded sound for a very specific reason. Music is typically transient, ephemeral, bound by the space and time in which it occurs, but recorded music brings the illusion of permanence, and even a small degree of the real thing, while still being subjective in a way that a representative image or a sentence simply cannot. A Stravinsky ballet removed from the trappings of choreography and the variations inherent in performance can still sound grotesque and decadent to one person and humble and delicate to another. If you take that to a much more basic, crude level, the same can be said of my music, even taking into account lyrics (although lyrics are a whole other beast). My second record has only been reviewed by a few scattered sources in its first week out there in the world, but I can already tell that the reaction is decidedly mixed, ranging from the ecstatic to the indifferent to the completely unimpressed and unenthused. This is a new experience for me, and one that I am trying to relish. So far I have been successful. Here is my reasoning.

First of all, and I say this as someone who writes music reviews on occasion, the idea of the popular music critic–that is, a person who feigns authority on the experience of listening to “popular music”–is pure rubbish. There is no reason for this occupation’s existence, and most popular music critics know it, and deal with it either through self loathing or through ornate attempts at self-effacing humor. There are people who write about popular music without this pretense of authority, but they are rare because it is so hard to do (I’m certainly not one of them). For a much more patient and eloquent explication of this argument than I could ever hope to provide, go here.

Second of all, and this is certainly related to point one, music’s ephemerality, its refusal to be pinned down, its shirking of all attempts at classifying it–all of these things are to be cherished, not written off. Take the Big Star album Third. Some people consider it to be unlistenable. I’m totally enthralled by it. I tried and failed to write a long article about it a couple months ago–I just couldn’t bear to finish it, because it was so exhausting to try to identify Alex Chilton’s state of mind, from the joyously sarcastic (or-are-they-just-joyous) “Jesus Christ” and “Thank You Friends” to the wistful “Nighttime” and “Stroke it Noel,” to the completely defeated “Holocaust.” But an album like Third cannot be written off. I’m not saying No Wonder is anything like Third, except that they do both contain multitudes, and the listener and/or music writer who cannot acknowledge those multitudes is missing out. Here’s the thing, not only about music critics, but about most musicians, too: the way we listen to music is not like normal people. It is often wracked by internal negotiations, minor prejudices borne out of years and years of musical memories that border on the obsessive. And on top of that, both groups listen to more music than the average person, certainly. Combine these two traits and you come out with a whole host of pathologies, some imaginary or at least unprovable, and some as real as you and me. Sound engineers often talk about something called “ear fatigue,” which is exactly what it sounds like. In other words, I can rationalize or at least tolerate just about any charge of mediocrity or unoriginality the internet throws at me, for the exact same reasons that I enjoy making records. I am truly grateful, however, that there are plenty of opinions out there to the contrary.