Each Friday, we bring you 10 random CD reviews done in 10 words each…
Beyonce I am…Sasha Fierce — Two CDs, six songs each. “I am…not environmentally conscious.”
Dressy Bessy Holler and Stomp — Simplistic indie-pop sounded a too straight-outta-the-basement.
Fitehouse Open — Spend more on music, less on scratch-and-sniff promos.
Otis Gibbs Grandpa Walked a Picketline — There’s a bit of grit in them thar folk vocals.
Dave Gross Crawling the Walls — 23-year-old rocks an old-school style of blues.
Jolie Holland The Living and the Dead — Weak vocals detract from songwriting. Sorry, but I’m not impressed.
Lordi Deadache — Cheesy metal is more entertaining when seeing them in costume.
Kevin Rudolf In the City — Cash Money backs rocker — even Lil Wayne can’t improve it.
The Sound of Animals Fighting The Ocean and the Sun — Musicians collective releases second album of alt-rock, odd songs.
Robin Thicke Something Else — Something about that falsetto just doesn’t sound natural to me.
This article appears in Nov 24 – Dec 2, 2008.
On Mr. Hahne review of Fitehouse’s Open: This is the best you got?! The whole scratch-n-sniff postcard series is part of a larger campaign to confront runaway copyright and the recording industry’s stranglehold on our culture (by promoting creative commons licensing, and taking queues from the “open source” software movement to promote musical creativity through sharing). I see that despite your delusions of journalistic grandeur, you haven’t yet learned to see the forest through the trees. It must be disheartening for you to realize that you’ve become just a cog in the corporate machine. Viva Fitehouse!
Yes, I would have preferred the band spend money to record more songs than spend money to send out countless numbers of scratch-and-sniff postcards. If there was more to the postcard than simple promotion, than it failed. I got tired of seeing them and ignored them after the first two – to me, they all looked the same and served the same useless purpose. Sorry.
It may only be 10 words per review, and the annoyance of constant postcards made more of a memory than the music – HOWEVER that’s not to say the music wasn’t good. I mean, I’m asking for more music, right?
Jeff,
Thanks kindly for the candid response. I completely recognize that no one likes a person that toots his or her own horn (or a band that is too self-promotional). They may be seen as groveling or annoying. For folks like you that need to sift through pounds of mail every week, I can totally understand why! Still, for some reason, we accept that it is more legitimate for a record company to promote its acts by buying nation-wide advertising or participating in subtle forms of payola. Marketing dollars can make a band seem “alternative” or the “next biggest thing”, when in fact they are just buying our attention and creating a false sense of “street cred”. While Fitehouse does not want to be annoying, we recognize that if Indy bands are going to make it without be forced to accept a “share cropping” deal from some corporation, they are going to have to get creative in the self-promotion department. While you may have seen the scratch-n-sniff postcards as senseless, they nonetheless served as an entrée to get us on the air in such diverse places as WKNC in Raleigh, North Carolina and WTMD in Towson, Maryland. The CD also received excellent reviews in the New Haven Advocate and Fairfield Weekly in Connecticut, despite the fact that the author, like you, expressed annoyance with the self-promotion. Unfortunately, without the postcards, I don’t think an unknown act like Fitehouse could have commanded so much attention on a nationwide scale. Perhaps a better model would be for more music reviewers to dedicate themselves to seeking out and reviewing some number of unknown/unsigned acts per week (such as you have done). Until such time arrives, Fitehouse will continue to fight the good fight and annoy a few good folks like yourself along the way. You have my apologies, Joshua Cohen, Minister of Propaganda, Fitehouse.