The Maccabees debut album ‘Colour It In’ came forth during a time when people were willing to listen to an album before passing judgement. The sentiment lay in the fact that through whatever cycle, the music we were fed didn’t sit well in our stomachs any more. We looked elsewhere for music that wasn’t in the charts. Well known radio stations were yet to tap into all the fad and hipster potential that accompanies finding new music, and we weren’t so accustomed to pressing ‘next’ on an album if we didn’t like a certain track…
I remember that I bought The Maccabees debut ‘Colour It In’ back when music magazines that you had to pay for were actually good. Like many people, I read a review, and if I got what the reviewer was sending my way, I went out and bought the album. Supposing you felt like me around that time, for a while things were good in the world of alternative music. Don’t get me wrong, times are still fruitful. However, it’s just that as Bob Dylan predicted years a go, times have changed. Advances in technology has seen a strange burst in music with an as yet, undetermined direction. You can find all the music you need through the internet. It’s D.I.Y time for a lot of people. Gone are the days of relying on music magazines and obscure radio shows introducing artists you’ve never even heard of before, buying music based on articles and reviews, and bands labelled ‘indie’ were actually independent (at the least in their early days). Now it’s all about Youtube, Vevo, Spotify, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, bedroom producers and DJ’s, torrent sites, branding, publicity, blogs, blogs and more blogs.
Is there a ‘saturation’ of new music in the world of music today? Probably… with the internet, super-connectivity, an ever lessening sense of privacy and our ever decreasing attention spans, it’s what sells. Who’s got the patience to listen to a radio DJ or read an article on a band we’ve already read about weeks before, via the internet? Before groups/artists/producers even have a chance to release an album or EP these days, blogs will have everything that you could know about them up on their sites - no doubt with a free track up for grabs if you hand your email over that will then be forever spammed.
This is being written after reading a pretty unjustifiably harsh album review of ‘Given To The Wild’ by The Maccabees. Said review was written by a leading music blog. The fact is, blogs expect too much from artists who have had a couple of successful albums, yet remained ‘indie/alt’ in the eyes of the music industry. In fact, in the case of The Maccabees, reviewers probably expect a different standard of different, seeing as the band emerged from a time when it wasn’t compulsory to be the next, next thing. Yet it was advisable to offer something that wasn’t plastic. ‘Colour It In’ was no doubt successful as it was back in 2007 due to peoples enhanced state of ‘open-mindedness’ towards those alternative releases - exhibitions of creativity, if you will. Even if the product wasn’t the most amazing thing in the world, people had time for it if it came from the artist not the label.
Perhaps people have reverted back to that state of musical-nonchalance, which arises from too much debate and musical elitism. So much so, that maybe in the feverous search for the next big alternative and innovative thing it’s simply opening up another lane on the motorway of ‘mainstream’?
So, what’s the point in listening to something that’s been deemed as less than 5/10 then? Well, I’m not going to tell you - and by the way, you definitely shouldn’t listen to ‘Given To The Wild’ … it’s rubbish.
Video: ‘Feel To Follow (Alternate Version)’
‘Given To The Wild’ is out now via Fiction Records.
