time for more music-related bitching. sorry, but i can’t hold it in.

i’m slightly bitter toward something that has come from music blog culture as i’ve experienced it. as i’ve pointed to in the past, better men have already described and decried the race-to-be-first, obscurity-craving tendencies of music writers on the net, which i fully agree with. i think there’s a corollary to that though that goes like this: sometimes you’re going so far out of your way to get to a band first that the band isn’t ready to be known or heard about yet.

there are probably examples of this where early hype set too-high expectations on a band that was just barely getting started, but i’m complaining about this for more practical reasons. i read on this blog, which i heard about on blog fresh radio, which i listened to originally because my friend james was on an episode, about this band called nana grizol (of which kevin bacon is a member…haha, not really).

the problem is, the song in question, ‘circles round the moon’, is amazing, which normally wouldn’t be a problem, except that i want a full cd by this band right now. i would go out and buy it this weekend if i could. the problem is that this band doesn’t even have an album yet. i’m really excited to give my money to some musicians who don’t have an ounce of physical output for which to exchange it.

which would be fine, except that i could very well listen to this one song to death for a month, let it drift into the depths of my itunes library, and have essentially forgotten about them by the time they’re ready to trade my well-intentioned dollars for their musical labors. then who wins, other than the music blogger who got to say, ‘oh yeah, i heard about them way before they even made an album?’.

now i’m not pointing fingers at this blog in particular — it’s a local music blog, and those locals have the benefit of going to see this band live, so perhaps it’s a half-assed example. but i am a little bummed at this pattern. say what you will about the extensive downsides of the radio & record label system, but at the end of the day after they took their too-large cut of the profits, at least they had the courtesy to time their hype machine leading up to a product release, and get a band’s fully conceived piece of work into the hands of as many people as they could.

having said that, here i embark to do just as i said, and listen to this song to death. it’s really, really good.