(Liars - Drum’s Not Dead)
Hadn’t really liked this much before, but I’m enjoying it now, half-listening to it in the background as I putter around the Internet and shower. Noise music has always disappointed me, somehow, always turning out to be different than what I envision from reading reviews, and despite that, I still keep trying. I tried the last Sunn O))) album, but it sounded like the hidden track on a Rammstein album, a joke I wasn’t supposed to get. I love the idea of Boris, but there is precisely one Boris song I like, and while I love it and it sounds like what I want all noise to sound like (“Farewell,” for the record), everything else makes me rush to turn the volume knob down. I want it to be more interested in beauty, I guess, slower and heavier and prettier. It’s not like I don’t like the sounds noise makes: when I sit down with my amp and a bunch of pedals, those are the sort of sounds that come out. But I also feel like I know how easy those noises are to make, and to see them haphazardly piled on top of one another with some awful singing thrown in is unsatisfying.
But maybe it was the locale. NYC is noisy enough that extra noise, especially for one as neurologically jumpy as me, seems extraneous. And Syracuse was so quiet and un-chaotic that noise seemed out-of-place. But where I am in Seattle seems perfect, somehow. When I drove down 23rd Ave yesterday, the sight in front of me wasn’t more city but steep mountains covered in trees, lurking and threatening. There’s enough mechanical noise and people-sound around to make it seem habitated and dense, but with something menacing just at the edges.
3 months ago
