Beware press material bearing gifts. The gift of description, that is. A few friends of mine from Pittsburgh are in a group that apparently sounds like GYBE! (according to a sheet of paper with words printed on it that arrived mysteriously with a CD on a Saturday afternoon in February. This piece of paper is a delightful shorthand for the indifferent or stupid). I missed the entire boat on Godspeed You Black Emperor; I think it was junior year of college when they became popular, and for whatever reason, I just never bothered to listen to them. I still have never bothered to sit down and check it out, and this is seven years later. All I know is that every description of them amounts to something like “they have loud/soft dynamics” or “the music swells” which as a rough characterization, I suppose is fine. Anyway, this puts me in, I think, a peculiar mindset when listening to Pittsburgh’s The Sea, Like Lead. I have no idea if they do or do not sound like GYBE! or not; press material is deceiving anyway. Anything with the slightest touchstone that a lazy reviewer can use to flesh out his description is invoked. What of actually coming to grips with a piece of music? Anyway, The Sea, Like Lead sound like Mogwai. Just kidding.
If one must trace the lineage of the music, and this is an interesting task as opposed to just naming consonant contemporaries, TSLL (so acronymized) are much more the movement of musical consciousness of another Pittsburgh band, All the Quiet, anyway. Pittsburgh is an interesting city to see this kind of movement in. Maybe any city that you’ve had a lot of interaction with and lived in for a long time and been active with the musicians and artists that compose the city, maybe any city like that lends itself to these kinds of exegeses (There goes my dissertation on Pittsburgh). But there was an interesting movement from emo (ugh as a genre term, but you know what I mean, so shut up) to rock to noise…does hardcore begin the movement? Maybe it ends it, that is, maybe the next logical step for those making noise is to make hardcore, or some sub-genre of hardcore (it is not monolithic). I’m not that interested in more than a rough understanding of that movement anyway, hence the somewhat rough description. However, as “epic guitarring” or however you feel like reducing a sound to – you can pick the terms, I don’t give a shit – goes, the movement from All the Quiet to The Sea, Like Lead is more than apparent. Listen to their albums. They’re both quite good. And even though Belegost doesn’t really fit into my equation, I enjoyed their contribution quite enough.
Also, if there ever was a question of whether accompanying art is part of the aesthetic experience of an album, J.Gray’s artwork and design are empirical evidence. They’re gorgeous. I will be sad when succeeding generations no longer care about the physical object. Actually, I’ll probably be dead. Enjoy your online world, future.
