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Spite Opinions

posted by: Noel Murray
August 19, 2005 - 9:35pm

Most rock/pop/R&B music buffs keep an interior list of artists we feel should be bigger than they are, and most of us keep a second list as well, of artists that have made it big, even though (in our opinion), they’re not as good. The hard part is not blaming the hitmakers for making hits. I know when I was a young buck music critic--fresh out of college in the post-Nirvana era--I slammed countless alt-rock gods that I didn’t think were as worthy as my pets. I wanted MTV to be playing Sloan and Superchunk, not Weezer and Soundgarden. And for years, I held it against Radiohead’s OK Computer that it was getting all the ink in the year that Built To Spill put out Perfect From Now On, a record that I still think is more thematically cohesive and tuneful (not to mention much better sung).

I’ve reconciled with Radiohead--though I vastly prefer Kid A--and I’m much more pragmatic now than I was in my early 20s, and don’t begrudge the success of bands that mostly elude me. (You go, Franz Ferdinand!) Nevertheless, it’ll make me happy if even half the people who love The Arcade Fire find their way into the arms of The Rosebuds when the latter band’s sophomore LP Birds Make Good Neighbors hits next month.

The first Rosebuds record, Make Out, was tight little pop gem that made my Top 10 list, and though Birds isn’t as peppy, it’s every bit as catchy and smart. It’s also a necessary counter to the fussiness of bands like The Arcade Fire, who’ve taken pop orchestration to an unwieldy extreme. I actually like The Arcade Fire, and I like excessive pop orchestration sometimes, but the simplicity of The Rosebuds--who get a lot of the same emotional and melodic effects with less instrumentation--is in many ways a more impressive trick. It’s like the difference between a post-modern novel that mediates on mortality and a good old-fashioned murder mystery.

Both bands are on Merge, and I’m sure the label would be as happy as I if fans of one band also enjoyed the other. But my rooting interest is, I have to confess, more partisan.

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