“I can’t remember a single song that we heard,” mentioned my wife as we entered Home Depot to buy paint for the holiday weekend project. I agreed. We had just been driving on a perfect 70-degree sunny day, listening to music and chatting about color schemes. The ride was perfectly pleasant, but what where we listening to? I honestly can’t remember. There were guitars, drums, and I think, kind of, maybe some singing? All the experts were telling me this was the next big thing. This is a major label after all; they usually get it right don’t they? The Blogosphere is listening, and those guys are the mavens and tastemakers that really understand music. I better give it another listen.
I did. I listened. Alone in my living room, with the music turned up, and a glass of wine, I gave it a chance. I was really hopeful that I would like this album. I didn’t, at all. It wasn’t that I hated it though. It was mostly that it was so ineffective at hitting me anywhere near my heart. It missed by a mile. In fact it missed my body completely, went through the walls and bored the neighbors. They banged on the walls yelling “turn that music too a more exciting band!” I obliged.
Sometimes music is so inoffensive, so utterly bland, so painfully boring, that we are none the worse for hearing it. We never even recall the experience except for the fact that we can’t figure out where our time went in that vacuum of sound. “There’s a Fire” by the famed Longwave is a purely forgettable and almost annoyingly monotonous album. It starts with a song that contains the only thing that could possibly resemble a “hook.” But “There’s a Fire” fizzles before you could even calculate that music is coming out of the stereo. What comes next is a series of songs that slowly slide till the eventual end of this musical detention. Towards the middle of the album, Longwave tries to get your attention by playing loud and fast. Unfortunately it all turned to white noise for me long ago.
Longwave isn’t a Brit Pop band, although they share many of the characteristics; watered down lackluster tunes, cliché heartless lyrics, and albums that don’t last the weekend. But like I said, if you let it play in the background, or if you are that downright sentimental that it reminds you of younger, infantile days of blissful schmaltziness, then you may love this album. You may love the numbness that it exudes or the wonderful memories of adolescent tediousness it reminds you of.
In the bio on their site, Longwave uses the popularity or notoriety of their producer, John Leckie, to build the hype:
“Then producer John Leckie signed on, and plans began to change. Leckie has produced some of Longwave's (actually, some of any intelligent human's) favorite albums: Radiohead's The Bends, The Verve's first album, The Stone Roses, he's worked with George Harrison, John Lennon, Yoko, Pink Floyd. The list goes on.
Yes the list does go on; unfortunately it now contains one of the most forgettable albums I have ever heard. |