Thread by @musicophiliamix, This album 'On Watch' by Chicago's Slow Mass @SlowMassMusic is throwing my [...]

This album & #39;On Watch& #39; by Chicago& #39;s Slow Mass @SlowMassMusic is throwing my head for a loop...

https://slowmassmusic.bandcamp.com/album/on-watch

So">https://slowmassmusic.bandcamp.com/album/on-... I& #39;m going to process here, likely to include: aging; fraught relationships with guitars; "retromania" vs. timelessness;

Firstly: & #39;On Watch& #39; is the best indie/emo/art-punk/post-hardcore album of 1996, a classic of the form, perfectly rendered, a touchstone.

Except it came out in 2018, made by musicians I& #39;m guessing were pre-K when & #39;Diary& #39; came out, if they were even born.

Does that matter?

This would& #39;ve been a favorite album of mine, age 16, in 1996, shared with friends in hushed reverence. Age 39, in 2020, I really like it. The latter honestly means more, given just how far this guitars, drums, bass, earnest vocals sound is from where my ears usually are now.

Context: & #39;Diary& #39; was the first "indie" record I heard, my entree into my small city& #39;s eclectic punk scene (where I was a long-haired outsider). It was my first taste of "now" being exciting and accessible. From Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead, it made rock seem ground-up.

It lead me to: & #39;Spiderland,& #39; Ida, Hum, Low, Cap& #39;n Jazz, whom I loved unequivocally; bands like Jejune, Fugazi, Squirrel Bait, Secret Stars, Versus, Mineral, whos appeal was fraught; and Promise Ring, Get Up Kids, Jimmy Eat World, Mogwai et al who ultimately led me out of "indie".

Circa early 1998, I had an mp3-stream "radio station" called & #39;A Boy and His Pet Heart& #39; replete with flash-based webpage with a stick figure and his pet heart in a cage.

By 1999, I was obsessed with Can, Miles Davis, Gang of Four, and left all that behind.

Which makes me realize: there was a post-punk revival not long after then. There was roughly 22 years between peak-post-punk and that revival.

It& #39;s 26 years now since & #39;Diary& #39;.

So Slow Mass is drawing on older music than Erase Errata were.

Fuck.

And so having said all that, and despite how negligible a presence non-post-punk-oriented rock music has had in my life and my ears since my early 20s:

& #39;On Watch& #39; is just damned fantastic.

It is not "original," particularly--but it& #39;s just perfectly done. It sits in no shadow.

So the question it forces one to consider: if something is good enough to escape the gravity of its decades-old influence, worn firmly heart-on-sleeve, and ascend on its own: do words like "nostalgia" and "revival" and "retromania" matter at all?

I& #39;m an architect by trade, and an urbanist and vernacularist with Classical training but who started off learning from the buildings I loved--all pre-War--as a teenager with no formal education at all.

Old meant nothing to me. Good was what mattered. Still does.

So professionally, I come down firmly on the "zeitgeist" skeptic side, the side that says tradition is always a living, changing thing, but anti-tradition just leads to boring repetition that calls itself revolution.

Musically, that influences me heavily: all music is "new"...

...to ears that haven& #39;t heard it.

All music can be alive, if its experienced sincerely. True invention is exceedingly rare, and so hardly a good criterion #1. Innovation, fusion, communication--living culture--is far more important.

I love all kinds of "weird" music, and all kinds of not-at-all-weird music. I tend toward the spaces where edges blur "between" genres; the friction and energy created there tends to excite me most, personally.

But I& #39;m also a bit of an anti-rock snob, if I& #39;m honest.

If I look back on my youth, the music from it that feels most important, because it& #39;s part of the continuous threads linking then to now, is Bjork, Joni Mitchell, A Tribe Called Quest, Dave Brubeck, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson. That stuff all feels like part of who I am.

"Emo," cargo-shorts and tight 3rd-hand silkcreened t-shirts, nights standing around the edges of shows on humid nights: the spirit of it all (Soophie Nun Squad the embodiment) is what I thought mattered. The music, I& #39;d left behind.

But here I am in the middle of the night, amidst a pandemic, in a time where it feels nearly impossible to imagine a future except in darkest terms...

Feeling a thrill to guitar-based, loud-soft dynamics, charged distortion, boy-girl vocals...

And it& #39;s reminding me, I guess, to be a lot less dismissive of what I thought were my personal musical "dead ends," the music I filed away as youthful folly.

I pride myself on "open ears," finding the good everywhere.

But @SlowMassMusic, thanks for making me do better.

Thanks for dispelling the notion that the past is dead, that only change progress. You& #39;re clearly doing what you feel, what moves you, and doing it gobsmackingly well. I doubt you care what some old nerd thinks, and you shouldn& #39;t. But I think it& #39;s great, anyway.

Quick plug for one of my favorite albums of what I guess is considered "2nd wave" Emo, which was never released at the time. Arkansas band called Everyone Asked About You (ties to later The Body). On that Jejune/Rainer Maria tip, but more fun: https://25diamondslabel.bandcamp.com/album/lets-be-enemies">https://25diamondslabel.bandcamp.com/album/let...

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