The New Music Conundrum
It’s 7:15 a.m. and I’ve already received about forty emails from record labels, publicists, bands and other sources. Contained in these missives are links to at least twenty albums — promotional streams with helpful biographies that tell the story behind each release, each sender hoping that I can help spread the word with a review, interview or feature. There are not enough hours in the day to listen to them all and by noon, I’ll have twice as many.
Finding oneself besieged by a deluge of spirit-bolstering new music is a great problem to have. But it’s still a problem.
Music journalism is my side hustle. What began as some boozy rants about Pearl Jam on the America Online discussion boards has become a bona fide business for me, albeit one of extremely modest scale. I’ll give myself a bit of credit — I’ve worked my pasty Irish ass off to arrive at a point where real magazines with real subscribers offer me money to write about music that I love. But the reality is that, for the foreseeable future, my writing endeavors will unfold only in those precious few hours after my day job is over, when my daily workout is finished and the dogs have been walked.
On a good day, I’ll check out maybe five of the albums that are sent to me. Picking them is part-logic, part-intuition. The subject line means everything — if it’s a band that I know and like, it’s an instant listen. If I’ve never heard of the band — and that’s at least sixty percent of the daily pool — I’ll rely on the description in the subject line and first paragraph of the email. “Italian grindcore upstarts,” probably won’t make the list but “Texas death dealers” or “Black metal revolutionaries” would probably make the shortlist.
To my detriment, I tend to favor the genres that I personally prefer — melodic death metal, black metal, doom, heavy psych and any inspired melange thereof. The problem is that I should be checking out the genres of which I’m either unfamiliar or even ones I don’t typically enjoy. I should be bathing in Italian synth pop, indigenous Australian folk and Slovakian choral chanting or whatever eclectic little fusions pop up in my Inbox.
Contempt prior to investigation, they say, is an absolute bar to all knowledge. I think it’s also a bar to inspiration. Wholly unbeknownst to me, I might be a feral denizen of Italian synth pop but I’ll never know because I have no interest in checking it out, and therein lies the conundrum. As far as new music goes, I allot precious few hours in the day and I tend to allot the vast majority of that time to styles and bands with which I’m already familiar.
Layer on my inexorable passion for listening to music that I already know and love. My playlists are packed with music that I first heard thirty years ago. Classic rock, alt metal, Britpop, 80s thrash and hair metal are as reliable as gravity and when I’m out on a long run, I find new music distracting. So my five or six hours running each week involve a serenade of oldies but goodies. My Spotify Wrapped is completely insane.
So this year I’ve committed to listening to more new artists and genres and to reading other music outlets with the hope of tapping into bracing new styles and movements. And so, without further ado, I’m now off to listen to Yelena Eckemoff and what has been billed as her “Epic, Medieval, Progressive/Jazz Masterpiece.”