Thursday, September 3, 2009

Ryan's Great Lake Swimmers review

Lost Channels by Great Lakes Swimmers is a contemplative, melodic, subtle album that features musical and lyrical complexity and a host of talented musicians (both the band members themselves and special guests who sit in a a few tracks). This is, on paper, exactly the kind of album that I should really dig. And yet, with the exception of a single song (Still), I can't say that I really enjoyed listening to it at all. It's just a boring album.

It feels a little shallow to say that. Music is entertainment but, at the same time, it's art, right? And when you're appreciating a piece of art, you're not “supposed” to judge it on the level of entertainment, but rather on how effectively the artist conveys their message through their art, and how technically proficient they are in the creation of the art, of the themes and symbolism found within it, and that sort of thing. It's considered unseemly, in some circles, to even talk about whether or not you enjoyed an album, because that's an inherently subjective and fundamentally biased aspect of the album.

And yet, here we are. The problem with not thinking about the entertainment value of an album is that, if there's no entertainment there, your audience isn't going to keep paying attention long enough to get to the deep, artistic elements of the album; they'll have given up on you long before then. That was my experience with Lost Channels: I'm sure that, given enough time and enough listens, I'd be able to find something that I appreciated about the album, but I don't think it's worth the effort it would take to get through the boredom.

No comments:

Post a Comment