Popless Week 31

Noel Murray finally hit Pavement. And of course, something "stuck out".

The destructive impulse in some musicians can be exciting in and of itself, and it's easy to understand why a lot of critics and music buffs gravitate towards acts that like to knock their own block towers down. But after a while, the knocking-down stops looking like creative courage and starts to look more like sadism, spiked with an unhealthy dose of adolescent petulance. There needs to be some element of contrast to make willful sloppiness work. In a movie, a long static take has more impact if it's not surrounded by a dozen more long static takes; in music, noise and aggression are often more effective if it's clear that a band is capable—and willing—to do something else.
Of course, musical preoccupations can go the other way, too. Some critics—myself, for one—get exhausted by extremity and start to overpraise music that is florid and pretty, seeing crystalline beauty as the supreme value. But that's a neurosis for another day.