#i think maybe i said i didnt like pop music one time in 2011 when i was forced to listen to katy perry in school on a daily basis and

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my dad has this weird misconception that i don't like pop music or 'old people music' ('old people' meaning his generation. so like early gen x.) which he consistently brings up whenever we discuss music... its like actually i think youre just inventing an entirely different version of me in ur mind because if im being perfectly honest ive been injecting midlife crisis pop directly into my veins for YEARS

[greenlightmusicreviews2]

The Revenge of GLMR!!! | Reasons, Review & Analysis

Because opinions are like voices, we all have a different kind, so just clean out all of your ears, these are my views • atcq "award tour"

There’s a lot different ideas that run through my head when I’m listening to music, and - although it’s been a while - especially when I try to review music. Obviously, there’s going to be bias because I have certain sounds and textures and concepts that I like more than others, but there are three that I expand on down below: effort, competence, and experimentation.

Of course that’s not to discount other aspects like... production value, mixing style, lyricism, songwriting, composition, style and a lot of other aspects to what makes a song work or an album flow - egads! - album sequencing!!!

I really like music, and at the bottom of that, I really want to like music. I’ve spent a lot of time writing my own music and sitting next to friends as they mix and produce the music I write, and so it’s exciting, new and different to sit on the other side and seriously think about the music that I get to listen to. I want to take more time with this endeavor and put in the work to maintain this thing. Maybe that means starting with familiar stuff and getting a feel with how I think about music with artists or albums I know. At the end of the day, I’m a guy on the net with a blog, but I hope you sweet, beautiful people find something worthwhile, interesting, funny and hopefully insightful from this thing. Maybe you can get something cringeworthy out of it. We may never know, but hopefully, we may.

In the words of Josh Homme:

If you've got the time and you've got the space you've got to make something of it. We might balls the whole thing up but you've got to try!

Effort

One of the things I put a premium on is effort: did’ja at least try to make a good song or record? Because if you didn’t, then fuck you.

In my teenage years I listened to a lot of alt-metal, post-grunge, hard rock and generally loud guitar music, so understand that I speak with some authority when it comes to that genre of music. Seether, Hinder, Nickelback, Godsmack, Papa Roach, Saving Abel, Three Days Grace - even bands that were influenced from the original crop: Daughtry, Theory of a Deadman, Popevil - and even bands that were just a little outside of generic rockers, bands like Foo Fighters, Audioslave, the sort of acts that were pretty well-respected but still made similar music but of a little better quality than their imitators. So I’m a bit of an expert when it comes to the post-grunge sound, that sound a generation or so removed from the Seattle heavyweights they hold in such high regard. My favorites of the bunch were: Foo Fighters, Nickelback, Seether, Puddle of Mudd, throw in some Everclear and that’s a good sampling of bands that I really liked at that time. These are bands that sounded like they put in a good amount of effort in the records that they made.

I hear distant scoffs, but only because it’s fallen out of fashion to dislike Nickelback, but hear me out: if you think Nickelback was generic and derivative, then you weren’t given the chance to hear Nickelback-lite.

Nickelback is a band whose blueprint was always more CCR, ZZ Top and Metallica than anything else, and their albums, save for maybe Curb typically reflected this.

They combined these three somewhat disparate influences with the sonic template that the Big Four of Grunge popularized and made some incredibly catchy and well executed music.

Hoobastank, on the other hand, you could tell sort of wanted to imitate Incubus, but recognized the immediacy of a band like NIckelback. Their music was similar, though never venturing further than Drop-D tunings, but their songwriting was sub-par. There was never, I sensed, the effort that truly made certain bands stand out. The lyrics especially, where they offered fairly banal observations and pleas for help:

Show me what it's for Make me understand it I've been crawling in the dark Looking for the answer Is there something more Than what I've been handed? I've been crawling in the dark Looking for the answer

- “Crawling in The Dark” by Hoobastank (2001)

The sound is part and parcel of what rock bands in the mid-2000s were aiming for in order to receive radio play: dull production value, samey chord progressions, vaguely introspective lyrics and leads that sound like U2 outtakes. Was there any effort, any character, any color, any life to your production, music or lyrics? Unfortunately, once executives and the ilk come in, well, that’s where a lot of “corporate rock” gets its reputation from.

Competence

Competence is one of those things where all it’s asking is, did’ja do it well? Does it sound awkward or cringey, or is it well-executed and hits the mark?

An example that comes to mind is Foo Fighters’ 2014 album Sonic Highways. After 2011′s Wasting Light, which was a watershed moment for the band, they began to really lean into their own legacy. Grohl and Co. became a standard-bearer for rock music at this time, and to an extent still do. What came after was a pretty bloated concept record about the musical history of the United States in 8 different cities tied together with an HBO documentary. While the documentary was actually decently made though not perfect, the record suffered from the band overextending themselves. They recorded the album in 8 different cities while interviewing famous musicians with deep roots in those cities, and then Grohl would go and write lyrics based on what he had learned in those interviews, weaving in little things they said here and there in order to form a coherent narrative for the song.

It didn’t quite work. The music is decent for the most part, but Grohl was just not able to make it compelling enough. Dave’s insistence on the record not straying too far from the band’s original sound didnt’ make sense when the entire concept was based on a city-by-city celebration of American-made music. The finished product was colored by Vig’s by-the-numbers production and Grohl’s own hesitation about making it too different.

There are musical projects that are well-performed and well-produced (i.e. competent in a couple different dimensions), but the overarching concept can be marred by the artist’s own musical limitations.

Danny Worsnop has had a successful stint with Asking Alexandria. His foray into country music with The Long Road Home is pretty good. Kid Cudi, the rapper whose Man On The Moon records were well-done pop-cum-rap albums, didn’t quite hit the mark with 2012′s WZRD and much less with 2015′s Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, both attempts to make rock(?) records.

An artist’s own musical limitations can hinder musical projects, even if other aspects of the music are otherwise done decently well.

There’s a dimension where a record can be “competent” in what it does and score a 5/10 or higher. There’s also a dimension where a record can be “competent” in what it does and score a 4/10 or lower. It’s tied to the effort made, and of course, goes by an artist-by-artist basis. Same thing with...

Experimentation

Not every song or album has to be a genre-bending, mind-expanding, sound-expanding trip through another universe, but artists that make an attempt to go beyond their comfort zone or beyond an established boundary get credit for doing so.

This is, again, kind of by an artist-by-artist basis. You can’t have multiple Beatles, for example, who rewrite the music playbook or whatever. But when an artist tries to go even a little out of their comfort zone, it’s appreciated. Take an artist like Ian Thornley. An extraordinarily talented guitarist and songwriter, his band Big Wreck recorded In Loving Memory Of... in 1997 and, although it took its blueprint directly from Led Zeppelin III, did some pretty interesting things sonically and early on demonstrated some great potential in developing their sound. Their follow-up was a bloated piece of work that unfortunately fell into the trope of “let’s go thicker on the guitars and have overblown ballads” that most rock bands in the 2000s fell into. After their break-up, Ian continued this trend with the plodding generic music of Thornley.

A band that actually threads this needle pretty well is Queens of the Stone Age. Josh Homme creates each record with its own unique identity, doing so competently, with effort, and not sounding (at least not all the time) like a phoned in attempt to sit on his haunchy laurels. Era Vulgaris, a personal favorite of mine, was this dirty, sleazy, almost evil sounding record while its follow-up ...Like Clockwork plumbed the depths of Homme’s struggle with depression and created gorgeous sonic landscapes on songs like “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” and “I Appear Missing.”

I like a little experimentation whether with production, music or lyrics. It’s not going to kill a record if they don’t really experiment, but the artist gets points for at least trying.

Final Thoughts, Concerns & Whatever Else

These three things are what immediately came to mind when I thought about what goes through my head when thinking about music. It’s not super technical, and probably comes from my own background as a musician without a background in theory and who pieces music together mostly through feeling and intuition. But there’s a bunch of other things that I know should look out, and want to look out for. Things like production value, lyricism, composition and style. The way I listen to music hopefully will change for the better, and looking back to previous reviews, I can do a hell of a lot better, and plan to. I actually hope to find better and more unique and interesting ways to describe how I hear certain sounds and even improve on listening out for certain, subtle aspects of production jobs.

Welcome back to Green Light Music Reviews! Sub-par music reviews for a healthy colon! Enjoy!!