New To Me - Vol. 2
Featuring Spoon, Pantera, and Amy Winehouse
New To Me is a series in which I listen to music I’ve somehow never heard and tell you how I feel about it.
Spoon - Gimme Fiction (Merge, 2005)
In 2005, I was a college freshman with my own computer and unlimited time to download music. How the heck did I miss Spoon? I should’ve been all over them. Maybe I could still be all over them now. It’s never too late to be all over something.
Gimme Fiction is cool. I enjoyed it more with every listen. It sounds like Pavement and Wilco and The New Pornographers. I like those bands, and so I must like Spoon, too.
Spoon is at their best when they’re jamming. Almost every song has an extra two minutes tacked onto the end, and the band uses that time to create old-time Krautrocking fun. The rhythm section is rock solid. The album sounds terrific. I’m a groove merchant, a merchant of groove, and I’ll gladly sell this product at my store.
That being said, I’m not crazy about the singer’s voice, and the “hit” on this album (“I Turn My Camera On”) is my least favorite track. This thing is back-loaded. I could play the last three tracks all day.
Would I listen to Gimme Fiction again? Yup
Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power (Atco, 1992)
Yeah, so I’ve never listened to Pantera. I’m sorry. Oh Amy, don’t hate me.
I like aggro music very much, and so yes, I did enjoy this, my first taste of Pantera. The album is inspired, okay. It’s got loads of riffs. It’s got that smelly liquor + weed energy. It’s got hair metal power ballads for some reason, too. Tracks like “This Love” and “Hollow” are truly inexplicable. How did they come up with that shit? You may cry when you hear it, and you may also spinkick.
Some bands that come to mind when I listen to Vulgar Display: Merauder, Korn, Marilyn Manson, Slayer, and Life of Agony. Do I like these bands? Uh, yeah!
Outstanding guitar tones, too.
Would I listen to Vulgar Display of Power again? Definitely.
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black (Island, 2006)
I get no pleasure out of disliking an artist, album, or song. This isn’t high school. Hating a band isn’t some personality quirk that I can leverage for social gain. I try to find the good in everything I listen to, and for the most part, I succeed. And so, let’s begin with the good.
“You Know I’m No Good,” the second single from Amy Winehouse’s second and final album, Back to Black, is pretty terrific. It’s got strong melodies, a sharp instrumental, and it sounds like a million bucks. Fun fact #1: AMC used it to promote season 1 of Mad Men, the greatest show of all time. Fun fact #2: it was recorded, in part, at Chung King Studios in New York. Fun fact #3: Wikipedia makes no mention of the Judge “album” Chung King Can Suck It in the entry for Chung King Studios. How bizarre, doo doo doo, doo doo doo.
The rest of Back to Black does nothing for me. “Rehab,” a song I’ve heard a million times, has the dumbest chorus melody maybe ever. The title track has almost 400 million plays on Spotify, but nothing about it stands out except that it rips off “Baby Love.” The non-singles, all of which I hadn’t heard until today, leave no impression whatsoever. Amy sounds a little like Dusty Springfield is the best I can say.
I didn’t go into this with an open mind, but because it’s one of the most lauded albums of the century, I did want to check it out in full.
Would I listen to Back to Black again? No