Of the various reasons for why I write album reviews, one of the foremost is the mystery involved in getting new music to listen to; as a former college radio DJ, I pine for the days when all I would have to do to hear new music would be to turn around to the shelves of rotation, that is, the new albums that had to be played on air, and pick something that looked interesting. There was a certain kind of joy that I got from sifting through the CDs, hoping to find something that appealed to me in the way that those bands in my formative years had—some kind of specific and trivial instantiation of Hope and Anticipation, one step removed from scouring the used racks at CD stores.
Getting a package of CDs to review then is like this: the hope that I'll not just find something that moves me emotionally or intellectually or, god forbid, both, but that it will be a work so affecting that I will be able to actually discuss things within the album instead of writing gimmicks or idiosyncratic descriptions of the music that more often resemble low-level Continental lit crit than actual descriptions, that is, the tendency for us critics to fall back on flowery descriptive terms, rather than actual analytic techniques. In the mass of all the indie rock and pop I get then, it is nice to receive an album like The Dao Son For's self-titled release.
In another review of The Dao Son For, the writer made the observation that this reminded him of Fugazi's Red Medicine, and the comparison is quite well-deserved: as on Red Medicine, which I saw as Fugazi's turning point from Revolution Summer rock to a more contemplative and adult way of making music—adding in almost Beatles-y pop ideas, there is much genre-bending on this album. It is the maturation of a mid-90s indie rockers in the way Pinback and Fugazi are. While a lot of the album moves about quickly from style to style, the consistent tone and feel of the instruments gives it cohesion as an entity which allows the members of The Dao Son For to try different things in each song without having them devolve into genre exercises.
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