TRENDSPOTTING: Call it a comeback

by Richard Trapunski

February 19, 2013

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On January 27, 2013, sometime between hits of reverb-y glide guitar and the deafening, organ-shaking “holocaust section” of “You Made Me Realise,” Kevin Shields gazed up from his shoes just long enough to tell a crowd of Londoners that the new My Bloody Valentine album “might be out in two or three days.” Six days later, the m b v was made available for purchase on the band’s website. No teaser, no lyric video, no promotional tweet. Shields let his guitar do the talking, and it said “whhhoooosssschhhhhh.”

A band self-releasing an album on their website is hardly a story, but it is when the band is My Bloody Valentine. This is a group that famously near-bankrupted their label Creation Records because they couldn’t get their guitar sound juuust right, that made fans wait decades just for a re-master of their seminal record, Loveless, an album whose legacy and aura are so immense that a 21 year wait for a follow-up actually seems kind of soon. And yet, after decades of (undelivered) promises, Kevin Shields just shrugged their first album in over two decades out into the world with barely a word of warning. And somehow, the world didn’t end (though their website did crash, pretty much immediately).

There’s something beautiful about Shields’ nonchalance about m b v, especially in the face of fans who go so far as to blame its absence for all of the problems of the last two decades. But the ethereal thunder of My Bloody Valentine pretty much exists outside the temporality of genres, fads, and marketing. My Bloody Valentine didn’t send out promo copies or one-sheets because they didn’t have to, but despite Shields’ calm indifference to the musical world outside himself, the way he chose to release m b v actually aligns him to a recent counter-trend. While buzzbands court blogs, live-tweet recording sessions, and leak tracklists, older, more savvy artists are staging comebacks with little to no warning at all.

The most recent example of this phenomenon belongs to David Bowie. After a lollipop to the eye (http://youtu.be/nT3VDE8zOMw), heart attack and subsequent ten year silence had most assuming he had retired and a few even wondering if he was dying (http://youtu.be/R2mhqo2ZRIk), the former Thin White Duke broke his comfortable silence by releasing the new single “Where Are We Now?” on his 66th birthday.

I haven’t heard Bowie’s upcoming album, The Next Day, but I can guess there are probably more triumphant “I’m back, bitches” type songs that could have been used for his comeback single, but the wistful, nostalgic, Berlin-referencing ballad was still received as if it was. That’s quite a feat, especially given the lukewarm (for him) reaction to his last couple of albums, but the delicateness of his return served almost the exact opposite function. “Oh yeah,” he seemed to smirk, “did I not tell you I’ve spent the last two years recording?”

That approach runs counter to the hip-hop influenced “guess who’s back, back again” bluster integrated into the pop music hype cycle, most recently typified by Justin Timberlake’s “I’m ready” teaser for his comeback single “Suit & Tie” (and the tweet teasing the teaser), but it preserves a quality long ago thought lost in today’s music industry: mystique. Very few artists still retain it in the over-shared, all-access, multiple-platform social media campaigns of the world’s biggest pop stars, but it’s the albums released the most suddenly that ironically inspire the most tweets, status updates, and “first impressions” reviews. Albums like m b v require time to sink in, but when an album isn’t immediately scrutible and clocks ticking towards deadline, publications are more likely to overrate than underrate.

There will always be cynics that view that refusal to play the game as the ultimate form of game playing. When most information is open and available to fans, sometimes no publicity is the best publicity. Epic post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor, for instance, have been taking this we’ll-only-tell-you-what-we-want-to-tell-you approach since the ‘90s, so when they began selling their new album, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! casually at the merch table of their concerts last year, they had to undercut that indifference with a grandiose statement sent out to press:

“For all the contents and discontents — for all the “content” — of our present cultural moment, the very idea of circumventing the glare of exposure or the careful plotting of media cycles and identity management appears futile. But Godspeed is looking to try all the same. The band wants people to care about this new album, without telling people they should. They want people to experience the thrill of anonymous and uncalculated transmission, knowing full well that these days, anti-strategy risks being tagged as a strategy, non-marketing framed as its opposite, and deeply held principles they consider fundamental to health as likely to be interpreted as just another form of stealth.”

Sometimes a simple “no comment” speaks volumes.

Tags: Music, Featured, News, David Bowie, justin timberlake, Trendspotting

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