Guys... I don't think Bee Thousand is actually all that great

Music
22

who knows where these irrational feelings come from?

Just sounds kinda like a pretentious post rock band name to me

23

Yeah but they started like at least 10 years before Mogwai formed, so they existed before post rock was even a thing, or something

24

Fair enough I don’t know anything about them

25

Which makes your first comment even stupider.

26

Woah there mate. No need to be like that.

There are a heap of bands I didn’t take interest in because I thought their name was stupid, including a fave of mine when I finally did hear them: Radiohead.

27

Exactly. You were put off by the name but they turned out to be a fave of yours. Lots of bands have stupid names but are great. I think GBV is a good name but I don’t know much of their music.

28

Sure but I’m not sure being arsy to someone who is honest about that is particularly reasonable.

29

It probably is stupid, I’d be surprised if other people don’t have lots of tiny ill thught out reasons why they don’t check something out.

30

Music doesn’t have to be great or even good to be able to enjoy and love it

31

To criticise GBV on the basis that you think they sound a bit ramshackle and unfinished is to spectacularly miss the point.

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32

Not it doesnt. It can sound ramshackle and unfinished and be hampered with all the problems that a ramshackeled and unfiinished record can have wether its by design or not.

33

Every GBV album is shit overall but most have a couple great tracks

35

I don’t trust people who are into ‘good production’ in rock etc., it’s just the wrong thing to be looking for

and in this case, it’s hard not to see it as a mistake about the ontology of music! - with GBV (but with any music since the advent of the popular availability of recorded music - at least any music made to be listened to via a particular medium) the way it sounds isn’t something added onto the music which obscures the real thing (the notes, the tune, whatever) standing behind the production, it is the music itself - there’s no meaningful distinction to be made between the abstract form of the music, the instrumentation, the performance, the production

(which is why the kind of person who thinks the test of a good song is whether it still sounds good played on an acoustic guitar is an idiot, or that shit about chord changes and resolutions etc. can fully explain why a song is good is wrong)

bee thousand actually and literally sounds better than any of the things that it could be compared to anyway, and if you think otherwise it’s because you’ve been brainwashed by ‘big studio’ and ‘major labels’ and their shills!

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36

Isn’t the distinction between a ‘good song’ and a ‘good record’?

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37

Absolutely, so many badly produced records are absolute masterpieces. I really like it when bands put out something that sounds a bit ‘off’ because they don’t really know what they’re doing. Explains why I love Bee Thousand so much I guess.

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38

that might be closer to what people here have been saying, but I’ve got my own axe to grind, and I’m procrastinating!

I am much less tempted to say a song can only be understood in the context of an album etc. though, but I do think that a something that doesn’t seem like a ‘good song’ on its own can be one on a ‘good album’. And on bee thousand there are definitely a few that I might think were weird and annoying on their own but perfect on the album

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40

some (but definitely not all) of the reunion stuff, as well as some of the stuff that cropped up on the millions of EPs in the 90s, and particularly a lot of Pollard solo material, does genuinely sound a bit too undercooked and underwritten, like he genuinely should have put a bit more work in before recording it. not the short song lengths but there are times when his chord progressions and melodies sound genuinely made up on the spot, which they probably are.

at their best though, especially on Bee Thousand, even the shortest song snippets sound like they’re supposed to sound exactly like that and any extra work might have just been detrimental.

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41

The thing with this period of GBV is that if you don’t like a song you know a new one will be along in a minute and a half

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