Steven Ward, in this brief comments thread, conveyed disappointment with Simon Reynolds for not (or anyway, for barely) mentioning music in his NYT Bowie review. I concur that it’s a problem because one simple question is never answered for me, which is why are people getting excited (faux-excited?) about this particular Bowie record now? Today, in Burning Ambulance, Phil Freeman reviews The Next Day, and fair to say, I think, that his piece exists at a 180-degree remove from Reynolds’s. That is to say, Freeman’s review is entirely, I mean literally almost first sentence to last, about what is happening in the music — the way it sounds, what various players are doing, etc. — with zero concern for the Bowie context, and indeed, little concern for any context outside of the music itself (I say “little,” because the review reads like an argument of sorts, for “feat[s] of instrumental interaction,” and Freeman does draw some comparisons to other musicians).

Freeman’s review never mentions clothes or hair. Reynolds’s review says nothing about how the drums are mixed. I find both approaches wholly unsatisfying, to be honest, though I’m hesitant to say that either approach couldn’t work. I’m curious how other people feel about all this; it’s a pretty fundamental argument, one that’s been taking place in music criticism for a very long time, possibly forever. As a reader — or a writer — do you gravitate towards one approach or the other?

Anyone who’s heard Womack and Womack’s ‘Teardrops’ will know that being a banging disco floorfiller is absolutely no guarantee of it not being one of the saddest songs in the world. And not every song on an album has to be heartbroken for it to be heartbreaking, of course.

- Hazel Robinson reviews Tegan and Sara‘s Heartthrob

Tom Ewing, refreshingly sane on one of the more puzzling phenomena of Brit-pop: the (cue hushed tones among folks of a certain vintage and haircut) first Stone Roses album. (Weirdly, I probably give more credence to the quiet-pretty-folky parts of the Roses than Ewing does, though I’d still rank the album a 6 instead of a 7.)

You know how people always talk about how in the Old Days you used to buy a record and really concentrate on it and absorb it. I did that with the first Stone Roses album and I strongly remember WANTING to have my life changed by it. The whole narrative around music was to do with hearing these life-changing records, so you felt like you were doing it wrong if you didn’t have those sort of experiences on a regular basis. For indie boys reading the NME was kind of like how reading Cosmo must have been for teenage girls sometimes, except for “Oh god why havent I had an orgasm yet?” read “Oh god why haven’t I heard a Life Changing Record yet?”. But the Stone Roses album doggedly refused to morph from a Pretty Good record into a Great one.

(Ewing‘s entire name-a-band-any-band feature is a fun read.)

Sandy Pearlman, reviewing the Stones’s Got Live if You Want It! in issue #8 of Crawdaddy! (March 1967):

On this album the Stones go metal. Technology is in the saddle — as an ideal and as a method. A mechanically hysterical audience is matched to a mechanically hysterical sound. Side two of the album is a metal side. Most mechanical. It has the historic “Last Time,” one of the Stones’ first big metal songs but sounding pretty tame in this company, a very metallic “Time is On My Side,” without the mellow yellow organ of the first try. A metal “I’m Alright”; and a moderately metal “Satisfaction” with metal mitigation supplied by Billy Wyman’s newly super-miked bass, which sounds as if San Francisco in August and the Airplane and Jack Cassady might have had something to do with it. It also has a significant merger of the metallic and the morbid…

Is this the earliest use of “metal,” as applied specifically to rock? I personally always think of “metal” as following on the heels of “heavy metal” (much in the way that “rock” followed on the heels of “rock and roll,” and much in the same way that “Led Zeppelin” begat “Zeppelin” which in turn begat “Zep”), and yet, according to Wikipedia, “the first documented use of the phrase [heavy metal] to describe a type of rock music identified to date appears in a [May 1968 Rolling Stone] review [of Electric Flag] by Barry Gifford.”* In other words, Pearlman leapfrogged past the still-impending heavy metal sound to prop up what he heard in ’67 as simply metal (and with his persistent use of the term “mechanical,” he could just as well be writing about Voivod or someone) — a pretty neat trick, when you think about it.

* “Nobody who’s been listening to Mike Bloomfield — either talking or playing — in the last few years could have expected this. This is the new soul music, the synthesis of white blues and heavy metal rock.”