Music Opinion Blog

Opinions and occasional rants about the state of the music scene. The views expressed are entirely my own, and do not represent those of any artists or publications with whom I may be connected.

Credit Where Credit’s Due

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Tim Hall

For years I’ve complained about The Guardian’s woeful coverage of metal and progressive rock. Major releases are either overlooked entirely, or worse still, given a cursory dismissal by someone with no knowledge or respect for the genre. Dave Simpson’s attempt to review Yes is a prime example. Even their most positive reviews came from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in.

Which is why it’s good to see Dom Lawson, of Metal Hammer and Classic Rock Presents Prog fame reviewing Opeth’s Heritage. It’s not a long, detailed review, but it certainly doesn’t read like Tony Blackburn attempting to review The Fall.

One swallow does not necessarily make a summer, but I hope we get to read more reviews by Dom Lawson in the future.

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On Songwriting and Production

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Tim Hall

A question for you all.

When it comes to making a great record, how much is down to the production, and how much depends on the songs themselves?

There is a school of thought that insists that the song is everything, and the best records have stripped-down, simple arrangements shorn of unnecessary ornamentation or instrumentation. But I feel that approach only really works if you’ve got truly great songs to start with. If you’re not Bob Dylan, the right sort of production and some imaginative arrangements are what makes great records out of good songs.

I won’t deny that it’s possible to spoil a good song by overcomplicating things (I own too many later-period Dream Theater releases to be able to say otherwise), and likewise you’ll never have a good record unless you’ve got something worthwhile to start with. As the saying goes, there is no point trying to polish a turd.

There’s a more fundamental question of where you draw the dividing line between songwriting and arrangement anyway. Is the song just the vocal melody and the basic chord progression?

Over to you…

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No Zero-Sum Game

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Tim Hall

As readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of female-fronted prog bands such as Mostly Autumn, Panic Room, The Reasoning, Karnataka, Touchstone and Stolen Earth, all of whom form a definite ‘scene’. All the bands know each other, and the relations between them in terms of shared band members is so incestuous that Pete Frame would have trouble drawing one of his rock family trees.

I think a bit of friendly competition between these bands is a very healthy thing, in that it encourages every band in the scene to raise their game. But one thing I strongly believe is that it’s not a zero-sum game. All these bands are operating below the radar of 99% of the music-loving population. While they’re never going to sell millions, at least without watering down everything great about their music, there’s still a far bigger untapped market out there.  The number of times I’ve recommended an album and got “Where have this band been all my life” in response is testament to this. These bands’ competition isn’t each other, it’s the heavily-promoted mainstream artists, and all those bloody tribute bands.

It will only take one (any one) of these bands to experience wider success, and they’re likely to pull the others through in their wake. So it saddens me when I read fans talking of “blowing away the competition” as if there can only be one winner, and “their” band can only prosper at another’s expense. Leave that sort of blinkered partisanship to sports fandom!

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Yet Another Music Biz Rant.

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Tim Hall

Sometimes I wonder if there are people out there who really believe there are no ways to find new music apart from either listening to Radio One or surfing MySpace completely at random. Just read this commenter in a thread about the failure (so far) of digital music products.

I know this sounds trite but it would really help if the big music companies did their job as “gatekeepers” and keep the mediocre music away from the masses. What ever happened to quality A&R departments? With the proliferation of cheap music sequencing programs, horrible club DJs and radio that is beyond unbearable, quality control is more important than ever!

It’s actually worse that that, Big Music is actively keeping far better music away from the masses. They’re pretty much only interested in the lowest common denominator music that follows a small number of proven formulas that they know how to market. And with more and more discerning music fans having made their excuses and left the mainstream, Big Music is increasingly left with the people who can’t or won’t seek out new music for themselves.

I personally think the gatekeeper/elite tastemaker model is fundamentally broken anyway and deserves to die. For better or worse, the Internet has fragmented the market, allowing artists in niche genres to market their music directly, bypassing that small and corrupt clique of gatekeepers and tastemakers.

Such artists rely on fan-to-fan recommendations to build an audience rather than on Big Music’s shock-and-awe advertising campaigns. Perhaps the role of new digital music startups ought to be to encourage that sort of thing, rather than prop up the dying major label business model? The thing about independent artists in niche genres is their business model depends not so much of gaining the largest possible audience, rather on minimising the number of middlemen between them and their audience. Digital startups are new middlemen, they’re only of any use to artists if the value they add is more than the cut they take. And they’re only any use to music fans if they act as a sort of smart filter, perhaps using some kind of wisdom-of-crowds approach to filter out the stuff that falls below the Sturgeon threshold.

Don’t expect the major labels to support such a thing – While they claim to speak for up-and-coming artists, the reality has always been that they’ll do their damnedest to marginalise every new artist except for the small minority that they choose to sign.

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Stupid Music Journalist Quote of the Day

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Tim Hall

Comes from The Guardian’s Mark Beaumont, in a blog post about Radiohead’s Kid A

By the mid-noughties, just like the mid-90s, alternative and mainstream were conjoined by a frothing mass media and shrinking major-label budgets – there seemed little distance between Kasier Chief and Sugababe, between Arctic Monkey and Crazy Frog. There was nowhere for an underground to be.

That really does speak wonders about the smallness of cultural bubble that “mainstream” music critics inhabit, doesn’t it? Just about all the music I love just simply doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned.

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Mark McGuire and the fetishising of lack of technique

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Tim Hall

I have a reputation for being opinionated and argumentative online, which is one reason I don’t post much on band forums nowadays – there are too many self-important sycophants who take offence, often on behalf of others, at what was intended as constructive criticism. So now I’m back baiting Guardian music journalists again.

Such an example is Ben Beaumont-Thomas’ Guardian Music Blog piece attempting to praise the guitar talents Mark McGuire, which starts with this opening paragraph:

Claims for the greatness of guitarists are often badly skewed. Many seem to regard guitar playing in a similar way to skateboarding, that greatness is about isolated feats of technical brilliance (an idea which Guitar Hero taps into and perhaps slyly satirises). Therefore songwriting from the likes of Dragonforce, and to a lesser extent Van Halen, Queen, and Guns’n'Roses is modular: guitar theatrics slotted into a framework, rather than folded into songs.

To which my first reaction is “Oh dear”.

Whatever you might think of Mark McGuire’s music (It sounds interesting, reminds me a bit of Matt Stevens or even very early instrumental-era Twelfth Night), I still maintain that opening with a thinly-veiled slur at Dragonforce (of whom I’m not a particular fan) is equivalent to me opening a review of someone like Panic Room with a paragraph about why I think The Libertines are rubbish. It would rightly be a distraction from the main body of the article.

After getting a few responses from the author in the comments, I realised that the thing wasn’t just about McGuire’s music at all, but was using him as a hook to hang a piece fetishising lack of technique. But far from being the iconoclastic position he implies it to be, all he’s doing is restating the orthodox position of the majority of rock critics from the past thirty years. 17-year old Dragonforce fans do not represent the establishment; that position is held by 40-something old punks. And I believe their attitude is deeply damaging to music. As commenter Troyka says:

Since the punk era it has been the norm to pretend that technique and ability don´t matter as much as enthusiasm. The result of which we can see in the uniform dullness of a lot of today´s younger guitarists (in the U.K at least).

Which is pretty much why we haven’t seen any great guitarists emerge in mainstream British music for at least 15 years. Yes, there are plenty of younger guitarists in metal, blues or prog, but they’re minority genres and largely aren’t on the BBC/NME/Guardian/Q radar screen.

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Time to bring back Top of the Pops?

Posted on September 12, 2010 by Tim Hall

On The Guardian website Miranda Sawyer campaigns for a return of Top of the Pops. Unfortunately she spoils a good argument with the mistaken opinion that The Mercury Music Prize represents the sole valid alternative to Simon Cowell’s X-Factor, and they are the only two games in town.

I’m not sure if the Top of the Pops format will work today, but we desperately need something to reverse the situation in the past decade whereby the general music-buying population is more or less completely cut out of the loop in determining which records and artists become successful.

With records played to death on the radio before they’re even released, we’ve reached the point where everything mainstream audiences get to hear is decided in advance by a very small number of elite tastemakers from the record companies and the media. The Mercury Music prize gives every appearance of being run by this same clique.

What was great about TOTP was the way it used a strict formula based on chart position to decide who appeared on it – nobody got vetoed because a clique of cloth-eared idiots from BBC light entertainment thought they didn’t fit the show’s format. If enough fans went out and bought the record, they got on. So we had Mötorhead on prime-time TV playing “Ace of Spades”, something which would be unthinkable now.

What’s very notable is the way the BBC marginalises genres like metal, jazz, blues or folk, despite their popularity up and down the country, in favour of various flavours of ‘indie’, which is all they think exists as an alternative to X-Factor pop. Yes, they might do the odd BBC3 documentary, but they tend to be very nostalgia-orientated, and don’t feature up and coming acts. Look at their festival coverage. For example, there was an eclectic mix of artists at Glastonbury this year, but you’d never have known it from the bands shown on TV.

Maybe genres have become so fragmented in today’s net-connected multi channel world that a crossover hit like “Ace of Spades” simply isn’t possible any more. But surely the best music of all genres deserves better than being trapped in separate musical ghettos?

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What is the point of The Mercury Music Prize?

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Tim Hall

What is the point of The Mercury Music Prize?

I’m not going to comment on the merits or otherwise of winners The XX – they’re so far removed from my own tastes in music that I’m simply not qualified to judge them. But I think it is fair to comment on the very obvious exclusion of entire genres from Mercury shortlists.

Apart from the token jazz and folk entries, it does seem dominated by various sub-genres of indie plus the odd hip-hop record. Far from being as broad as it’s apologies claim, it’s pretty much restricted to the sorts of artists that Apple Macintosh-owning urban metrosexuals might have heard of. I recognise that prog is too niche, but it’s unthinkable, for example, for a metal band to make the shortlist. Admittedly a lot of cutting-edge metal seems to be Scandinavian these days, and The Mercury is restricted to British and Irish acts. But why have Iron Maiden never got nominated? And when was the last time an out-and-our pop album got nominated? Surely Simon Cowell’s karaoke drivel hasn’t killed pop completely?

Alexis Petridis’s Guardian Article gives the game away – he doesn’t quite come and out and say it, but I think the subtext and inference is pretty clear. The main purpose of The Mercury Music Prize is indeed not to celebrate the best of British music in all it’s diversity, but is merely a cynical ploy to sell records to the demographic that doesn’t know much about music, but wants to think of itself as cool and sophisticated.

Which is a perfect justifcation of why, despite the genre’s eternal popularity, you’re never going to get a Metal band in Mercury shortlist. Metal just isn’t a genre you can sell to people like David Cameron or William Hague.

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The Digital Economy Bill: The Costs of a Terrible Mistake

Posted on April 11, 2010 by Tim Hall

In The Costs of a Terrible Mistake, Doug Richard expresses all the same concerns as in my previous post. Only rather better-articulated. And he doesn’t mince his words in the conclusion.

There was no need to rush this legislation through except that someone, somewhere wanted to get passed under the wire. Someone wanted a bad law in place, and in the wrapping up of parliament it happened.

That is devastating.

And people think I’m overreacting when I call for a boycott of the “Big four” record companies (Sony, EMI, Warners and Universal). While I’m sure there are other vested interests in play, especially the cynically calculated evil of Rupert Murdoch, there does seem to be smoking gun incriminating the major labels, who may have given us some great music in the past, but are now dinosaurs willing to trash the future in order to postpone the extinction they so richly deserve.

There are many lifetimes’ worth of great music released by smaller labels and independent artists – we don’t need the majors any more, and a boycott is far less than they deserve. Not as dismissal of ‘mainstream’ music as an act of musical snobbery, but a refusal to give any of my money to businesses who act in such a disgraceful way.

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Why they review what they review.

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Tim Hall

An article on The Guardian Media Site has turned into an interesting tangential discussion on exactly how The Guardian decides on what to and what not to review.

Film and Music editor Michael Hann came up with this gem:

Other albums that “have to be reviewed” are the ones that are achingly hip, or from artists one would expect to see reviewed in the Guardian – the likes of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, for example.

This drew a wonderful spleen-filled response one noted metal fan, to which Hann responded.

And features are actually a better way of contextualising minority interest musics than reviews are, especially when accompanied – as our features usually are – by a playlist.

Which ignores the fact that hipster-indie is as much a minority interest music as metal. Except that the groupthinking Guardian writers don’t seem to be able to realise this.

So far, I haven’t had a response to exactly why they “have to review” Bonnie “Prince” Billy, but did not have space to review Opeth’s “Watershed”. A cursory glance at the sorts of tour venues the two artists play suggests both are of similar standing in terms of audience style.  While I know popularity isn’t everthing, I cannot see how the relative merits of progressive death metal vs.lo-fi indie folk are down to anything other than purely subjective taste.

Or is it simply Opeth are further from their comfort zone than hipster-indie?

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