The New Year - Newness Ends
(Touch and Go)
As you know, Bedhead was a really good band, a really great band, I guess
the best band ever. Or at least the best "slowcore-country" band ever,
which is pretty big honor, and puts them higher on the heap of all-time
historical great bands than the at least four other "slowcore-country"
bands I can think of. Plus they were better than pretty much any band
that fit into the wider category of slowcore proper. Better than Low?
Yeah, I guess so. Better than Rex? Well, they are from Tex. So
seriously, they were good, and they were great, and that's why listening
to The New Year is like getting painfully socked in the teeth. And at
first, the blow of disappointment that THIS BAND JUST IS NOT BEDHEAD,
unfortunately seems to be the most powerful thing The New Year has to
offer.
It took me about three times through the disk to start getting over it.
Then I started hearing the New Year songs instead of the Not-Bedhead
songs, and I started to realize that the bigness of my disappointment
doesn't mean that the New Year is a bad group with bad songs; it just
reflects the bigness of Bedhead. And I realize that The New Year is
really its own group, and should have the right to be judged on its own
merits. The hardest thing about this is that The New Year, predictably,
sounds an awful awful lot like Bedhead, just not quite as big, not quite as
passionate, not quite as spacious, and not quite as ready and able to send
chills down your spine.
As it turns out, dispassion actually seems to be the intentional theme of
the work. The album title Newness Ends seems to be be a reference to
boredom and stagnation, lyrics like "One plus one minus one is equal to
one" seem to be saying something like "good things happen, bad things
happen, so what?" In the song "Gasoline," Kadane blandly points out that "I
knew I never should have been a musician." None of these things carry
strong, melodramatic, exciting emotions, just a general sort of malaise.
Nay-sayers will most likely point out that
Newness Ends seems to be a regression from Bedhead, and a backwards turn
towards more traditional rock and roll. Yes, but most people who return
to traditional rock do so in an attempt to capture the excitement of a
young art. This is usually doomed to failure, because rock and roll music
is just not new anymore and can't ever be as exciting as it was when
people were first hearing it. On Newness Ends, the band plays traditional
rock and roll with something like apathy. The result is a record which,
intentionally or not, reflects personal melancholy and hopelessness in a
statement about rock and roll music in general. Which makes sense, since
these guys, like it or not, decided to become professional musicians a
long time ago, and it seems that they're doomed to continue to be that, no
matter how loudly they pronounce that their bands are breaking up and they
can't do it anymore.
So is the album exciting to listen to? No. It's dispassionate, it's
reticent, you could even say it's a bit bland. But its despairing quality
somehow makes it quite effective and strangely pretty. It turns out that
I like it a lot.
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