Thanks for all your responses to the Favourites Of 2009 flam I posted last Friday; I’ve posted some further thoughts there, which’ll doubtless inflame the Decemberists and Felice Brothers fans (more or less on my own here in my apathy to the latter, incidentally; check this for Allan’s eloquent alternate take).
I’ve always thought that the British music press’ reputation for ‘building them up and knocking them down’ is a bit erroneous, though it’s undoubtedly true that there’s a possibly obsessive fetishisation of the new that can sometimes bias against longer-serving bands. Maybe ‘build them up, get distracted by something else, then more or less forget they exist’ might be a truer reflection of what happens.
More grade-A new psych from San Francisco today, with this third album from a quintet bearing the cosmically unwieldy name of Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound.
It’d be nice to claim that I had an infallible eye for spotting a future superstar, but watching the ascent of the Gossip over the past two or three years, I’m reminded that there was a band I could’ve never have imagined becoming big. When I first saw them play in, what, 2002 maybe, I thought they were terrific. But they also seemed to be so tightly embedded in a post-riot grrl scene of fanzine elitists that, for all the strengths of Beth Ditto’s personality and pipes, they’d surely be more or less unintelligible to the mainstream.
