HAIM

chunklet would've made fun of haim but there's a 65% chance it would have been funny about it

xp To what 'in crowd' are you referring, exactly? Potbellied guys who like Captain Beefheart and The Fall or the young, articulate pop apologists on this thread?

This

How fortunate that so many rock critics have discovered the latent love for pop music that always laid deep within, just at a time when it’s been proven that you will not get work if your music criticism does not attract the requisite number of hits in web 2.0.

may be cynical as fuck but it's also pretty otm

also 65% otm too

presumptuous as fuck IMO.

I'm not going to continue ranting

Wtf is this "objectively terrible " bs?

this thread and the creativity and artistry one might as well merge if we're going to head down that rabbit hole!

btw I liked The New Radicals

xp To what 'in crowd' are you referring, exactly? Potbellied guys who like Captain Beefheart and The Fall or the young, articulate pop apologists on this thread?

the former, of course. my people, the middle-aged, postpunk chunklet readers of the world. the rug rats have their own code, in which rick astley probably stands for something very different.

lol at the idea that writing pop criticism gets you any more web traffic than writing criticism about any other music does

seriously

spin's haim feature got crushed traffic-wise by our stream of the melt banana album

also lol @ getting so up in arms about CHUNKLET, oh no who could ever "take a swipe" at it

whiney if i'm not mistaken also likes chunklet and has contributed to some chunklet projects and normally when you say that something is "sub-" something else, it's not a swipe at the publication but the person

If there's two thinks I like, it's subs and Chunklet.

I've written for Chunklet and love Henry, obviously. But "punk rock über alles" as a their default doesn't exactly gel with my worldview.

This thread is sub-Miley and currently over-Albini, but both of those will change with my post.

this thread and the creativity and artistry one might as well merge if we're going to head down that rabbit hole!

― Neanderthal, Saturday, October 5, 2013 11:30 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've purposely avoided that thread because I already feel like Chaplin railing against the talkies here and I'd just as soon not be one more of those guys.

Chaplin later made a couple of awful talkies so

don't feel Chaplin as much as you're telling us "hate more stuff".

"spin's haim feature got crushed traffic-wise by our stream of the melt banana album"

to be fair comparing a feature and an album stream is like comparing apples to the NYT front pge

great thread.

recently i have explained to younger folk just how unfashionable Fleetwood Mac were in the late 80s/90s and had funny looks. people can't believe they were ever not hugely popular/cool or whatever but even i was surprised to watch this. i never considered them to be 'punchline of a sketch/ butt-of-a-joke' unpopular

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9iwNicTDcA

and i mean yeah you can say 'oh so some shit 80s comedy outfit didn't like them so what?' but there it is.

very pertinent post

You're assuming anyone paid attention to chatter. In the nineties the Rumours singles got as much airplay as they do now, and so did "Gypsy" and the Tango singles (particularly "Everywhere").

Hmm. I discovered Rumours and Tusk in the mid nineties and while I didn't read longform articles defending them I didn't need to! The first was already accepted as a classic, the second as a problematic one.

where's the fleetwood mac here

i heard the "oh well" cover

oh well

There are bands out there who bear far more resemblance to Mac than Haim do. It's not a baseless reference, but it's also a reach.

The only song on this album that sounds like Fleetwood Mac to me is "Honey & I"

yup

I dunno I'm still hearing a lot of Mac in it, especially in the guitar. I think a lot of the vague allusion to Fleetwood Mac-style rhythms comes from the very rhythmic palm-muted melodic lines that are all over this album and to my ears very Lindsey B.

Eh I hear it in the fussy percussion/arrangements, but the palm muted rhythmic guitar stuff is a staple of '80s pop in general.

i was trying to decide if the guitars reminded me specifically of lb and ended up thinking that they don't.

i guess the closest you could get is that there are a lot of minimal and carefully inserted guitar parts, which was common on the mac's poppier songs

xp I don't know about the US but in the UK Fleetwood Mac had very little hip cachet in the late 80s or 90s. Mick Fleetwood was best known as the Munster-like guy who did the Brit Awards with Sam Fox. At that time most people would rather have jacked.

I think it's a tiny bit more complicated than that, they weren't mainstream cool at all but the balearic-heads were into them. Those arthur baker remixes of 'big love' and 'family man' in particular.

But I don't hear much Mac in HAIM either tbh.

Fleetwood Mac's biggest wave of resurgence in the US in the 90s was the Clinton campaign -- they were the soundtrack of cooler-than-usual-but-not-really-that-cool baby boomers.

I thought The Dance did it...? A month before the performance my local New Times publication wrote a consideration of their career, even reminding people that Matthew Sweet recognized the brilliance of Tusk by hiring Richard Dashut to produce Altered Beast.

Mick Fleetwood plays on that record, too. I don't think Dashut's presence had anything to do with Sweet's specific love of "Tusk," though.

It's a little too tidy to say "The Dance" renewed interest in Fleetwood Mac, because "The Dance" was their reunion/tour, so duh, of course there was renewed interest, since the formerly broken up band was suddenly touring again. I will say this: there was little to no hipster interest in "Say You Will," and that album is weird and awesome. I similarly sense little to no hipster interest in Lindsey solo, and in many ways that seems of even more interest to hipsters, since it's so strange and relatively not mainstream. So maybe it's the vague idea of Fleetwood Mac that is cool - like the girls at outdoor festivals who wear face paint and vaguely Native American headgear - because I'm willing to bet plenty that there is barely a tiny fraction of, say, Vampire Weekend's fanbase that has ever played a single Mac song of their own volition. Musicians and bands into Mac, that's another matter, but that's already a much smaller pool.

yeah the NT reporter's angle was "See? Even Matthew Sweet likes the Mac!"

well he would

as someone who grew up not listening to his parents music, in fact whose parents didnt listen to any western music at all, let me break it down for you: HAIM rules, fleetwood mac have some okay songs and some terrible songs, tango in the night is a middling album. HTH

Fleetwood Mac has put out so many albums in so many modes that I'd be amazed if someone couldn't fill at least an album's worth of awesome.

or five

Seriously, though, per the band's cachet, as such, I think what The Dance" did and beyond is to at least make the band acceptable as more than just yuppie product, differentiating it from other '70s "corporate" rock a la the Eagles or ELO or whomever. It's not that Fleetwood Mac is hip or cool so much as not uncool, which is something. Also, the band's back catalog works as a sort of insurance - if you hate the '75 era and beyond, there's all that other stuff that came before, which not only shows the band paid its dues but also provides hours of hardly overplayed stuff to delve into. And then even further there's all of the '80s Nicks stuff, which is a different sort of touchstone, plus the Lindsey solo stuff, which is more obscure. Lots of open avenues for exploration. This was never a band whose "Greatest Hits" was going to be its biggest seller, or the standard album is everyone's collection.

Also the variety: there are ballads and rockers, some with female singers, some with male, some duets, all equally good but most very different. Plus, the band can play.

yeah but HAIM. they've eclipsed all those things in one album, apparently.

So maybe it's the vague idea of Fleetwood Mac that is cool - like the girls at outdoor festivals who wear face paint and vaguely Native American headgear - because I'm willing to bet plenty that there is barely a tiny fraction of, say, Vampire Weekend's fanbase that has ever played a single Mac song of their own volition.

Well there is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcYT8TzUarI

Everett True says:
October 6, 2013 at 8:58 am
Dismissing the idea of a ‘hivemind’ whilst invoking I Love Music seems a little bit contradictory to me.

To deny that some form of “collective conciousness” often occurs wherever like-minded folk congregate (on places such as message boards, say) seems somewhat disingenuous to me, also. Or perhaps it’s more of a “collective subconsciousness”?

The fact that Dorian felt safe enough to call Scott’s review “sexist” – when it quite clearly is anything but – after seeing it linked from the self-congratulatory, smugger-than-thou ILM message boards is telling. (And also helps explain to me why such an intelligent writer as Dorian saw fit to use such an inappropriate insult in the first place.) I suspect that if he’d chanced across it on his own, his views would have been different. Maybe they wouldn’t have been, though. As he points out above, Scott’s writing is (sometimes) filled with attention-seeking vitriol, (sometimes) directed at other journalists – and it is hard NOT to rise to bait like that.

Who knows? Context, context, context.

congratulations, you guys!

because I'm willing to bet plenty that there is barely a tiny fraction of, say, Vampire Weekend's fanbase that has ever played a single Mac song of their own volition.

hahaha WHAT

i mean there a million really specific genealogies you can trace out--i think the balearic angle is an impt one--but the big picture is just that mac is cool now because they werent cool before and thats how cool works

xpost I know VW covered the Mac, and I know people were into it, and I bet a good number of VW fans claim to love Fleetwood Mac, and I bet a tiny, tiny fraction of them actually play FM, any more than they play, say, Steely Dan or Chic or any African music, for that matter. Which is fine, obviously, but it's a more casual kind of part-of-the-culture fandom to say you like something even if you don't actively listen to it. Do I like Chuck Berry? No, I LOVE Chuck Berry. But it's not often I play any of the many Chuck Berry comps I own.