this was the friday that just passed, in detroit, so i'm almost caught up. and, it's more up my alley, certainly - enough that i may have gone, if the situation were more ideal.

but, there's a kind of constant with the material in that it doesn't really go anywhere, and it kind of sputters around in circles. there's all kinds of buzzwords being thrown around on the bandcamp site, but the term you usually see attached to music of this sort is "post-rock", a term that i will acknowledge has been shunned partly due to it's association with bland repetition. the thing is that this kind of perpetuates the stereotype rather well. something you'll notice listening to this is that every time it seems like they're about to break it open, it just falls back into the repetition of itself.

i'm consequently reminded of an 00s acts called warpaint that showed up right at the bottom of the last cycle, and seemed to turn a lot of heads before kind of evaporating. they were exciting in the way that made sense to people at the time, namely they were the perfect aesthetic, the perfect fashion choice - an accessory, if you will. but, their actual songs were not very well constructed, and they couldn't hold an audience as a result of it. the sudden realization that a band of this type must write actually interesting music that has some actual depth beyond the aesthetic in order to keep an audience seems to have taken a lot of people by surprise, including the band. you don't get much of a crossover into pop culture with something like this, and you can't market it like it's a pop band.

they were a turning point, though. the industry kind of hit rock bottom with warpaint, before it corrected itself.

don't get me wrong: with enough marijuana in my system, the aesthetic would have dominated, and i would have enjoyed the show. but, it's not actually very interesting beyond the surface atmospheric, which wears off before the record finishes.

if we're stuck on this perpetual wheel, let's at least hope we're bottoming out.

https://mintfieldil.bandcamp.com/