A Bad Record Beats a Boring One

Somebody stopped me at the mailroom window on Tuesday to ask whether two stars was the worst I could do. It is not. Two stars means I finished it.

The distinction people want is a matter of degree, and it isn't one. A bad record tried something and missed. A boring record is one where nobody can be caught having decided anything.

ANGER INC. mailed in a reel in March with the kick so far forward it swallows the vocal from the bridge on. That is a mix failure and a large one. I wrote it down, I said so, I gave it two and a half stars, and then I played it four more times in the Vault with the door shut, because the failure is interesting. Somebody chose that kick. Somebody sat in a room and decided the drum mattered more than the words, and they were wrong, and being wrong in a specific direction is information. You can remix a record. You cannot remix an absence.

The boring ones arrive clean. That is the tell. Levels are correct. The snare is a snare. The second chorus shows up on schedule with a guitar layer added, because the second chorus is where you add a guitar layer. Nothing is broken. Nothing is anything. I have sat with one of those for the full eight hundred words and had to write around a hole in the middle of the page, and those are the reviews that take two days instead of an afternoon. Panning a coward is harder than panning a fool.

How the cards work

Index cards, one per pass, and I don't write full sentences until the third.

First pass is arrangement only. Where does the song change shape, and does it change shape because the song needed it or because four minutes had gone by. I mark bar counts when I can hear them. Second pass is performance: whether the singer means the line, whether the drummer is listening to the bass player or only to himself. You can hear that. It is not a mystical skill. A drummer who is listening leaves a little room before the downbeat and a drummer who is not fills it.

Third pass is the mix, and by then I already know whether I am writing a review or a condolence.

Dave McCoy came up to the Wire in July to argue with me about a three-star. Not about the stars. He wanted the word back. I had called the record polite, and he said polite is not a criticism, it is a manner. He is a frontman, so of course he went for the adjective and not the verdict. I told him polite was the only word I had, because the band spent the whole B side declining to be a problem for anybody, and he stood there with his hands in his jacket and did not have an answer, and then he asked if I wanted coffee. The coffee down here is bad in a specific direction, which I respect.

Two things people get wrong about the reviews. The first is that a low rating is an attack. It is attention. I do not spend eight hundred words on a record I don't care about; the ones I don't care about get a line in the catalog log and no stars at all, and the artists who have been here a while know that is the real bad news. The second is that I enjoy this. I enjoy about a third of it. The rest is sitting through a Vesper drone at a length that would qualify as a commute, at the volume Vesper insists on, in a room they keep at a temperature I have complained about in writing.

The Big Tex review runs next month. The session is on the fourteenth. The third verse comes out tired, and tired is the word, and I would rather be wrong about it. I checked the card twice.

Send me a bad record. I will be rude about it and then I will play it again.