The Party Girls/The Mack – split 7” (Louisville Is For Lovers)
One of these bands has dissolved since this split’s release last year. I know which one (because I do my research!!) but my refusal to include that info has little to do with games and everything to do with a lack of importance regarding the matter. Primarily due to a similarity demographic girth when it comes to music-scene properties, Louisville shares some negative aspects with my town (Memphis). What lazily shuffles and buzzes from my speakers at the moment is one reason I gradually did away with 95% of my house-party attendance. That has nothing to do with a party’s featured live music for the evening and everything to do with parties being choked with the type of human found making this type of music: dudes so deficient of common sense that they ask a certain kind of question when speaking to label-heads, resident music-writers, anyone around that happens to have ovaries and anyone in control of venue-booking. It goes like this: “So, what did you think of [my band/the set/other personal creative endeavor]?” If you’ve ever asked someone this question … someone you were not related to or were not fucking, I have a little news for you: Silence means you suck. And that question means you are insecure. What we have here is Provincial-Delusion, evident via the label and its product. This infects small-to-midsize scenes until you get labels that release music based on nothing other than a shared regional proximity. Do not support music from your town. Support good music. 100% of sides A and B contain a genre known as Terminal Opening Rock or Local Rock. Deep-down and never admitted, it’s a self-made, proud classification.
What gives it away? Well, it’s nothing other than the sheer terror these types have towards the reality of getting in a van and being a real band. I have not shown a journalistic crime by depriving the reader of any descriptive language up until this point, and none will be committed when the review ends without enlightening anyone as to how this record sounds or precisely what form of music can be found here. I care deeply for the health of underground music. I listen to music all fucking day long and have an advanced method of processing what I hear. I am a record-person and have been for over twenty years, for better or worse, and this has awarded me with a sense of things that IS IMPORTANT thanks to the unseen and silent hand of NEW PAYOLA, otherwise known as the flat-out WRONG influence and power currently wielded by anyone with the ability to advertise or send out pre-release FIRSTY-FOOD to bloggers and online music-writing venues. I may ultimately lose, but I will nonetheless fight to change what music discovery and intake has turned into: One big grocery-store on Saturday … tons of samples that ultimately annihilate the practice of proper processing or savoring or enjoyment or educated distaste while promoting a stunted, transparent, fickle and just fucking DUMB frame of musical reference.
There is some scary stuff behind all of this, my friends. I’m good for either total befuddlement or “Guess what? Others can see or hear that statement…” when presented with any dipshit from which the following statement emanates: “Why should I listen to some older, out of touch, failed-musician who tries to tell me what is and what isn’t good when I can listen to it for myself and form my own opinion!?!” I don’t want to think about how much amazing music I dismissed upon early consideration without the benefit of a navigator when I initiated the unstoppable drive to plow through band after band on a quest for greatness (that continues in a slightly different fashion to this day). My opinion was very often something just south of complete garbage when I was young, and if I didn’t have certain writings in the pages of Conflict, Forced Exposure or Your Flesh (to name a few) to at least decrease the overload of frustrating gambles, you wouldn’t be reading what I write and I wouldn’t be in love with a lot of the music I am in love with. I’m not here to issue a calls-to-action as far as checking out or not checking out certain bands, as that isn’t my place.
Conversely, I know enough to state with complete confidence that this record shouldn’t have crossed my desk, something I’m writing not from an “isn’t my thing” place. I am studied enough to know what is happening here, and what is happening here should not exist. Bringing it down to a local level, each time a stagnating or backwards-pulling 7” is allowed to come into being, the next Coliseum is somehow robbed of the opportunity to give the world its own inaugural sonic blip. I’m not sure how this particular law of things works, but I’m certain that it’s in place. (http://www.louisvilleisforlovers.com)
(Andrew Earles)
