Ah, Autumn in the nation's capital. The days are a couple of degrees cooler. The leaves are starting to fall from the trees. The wind is springing up. (I don't like that much.) The light is fading as I wait for the evening bus home from work. A new bunch of songs on the iPod. Fitting, then, that so much of the recent music that has come to my attention draws from the ancient well of those three essential Fairport Convention albums, "What We Did On Our Holiday", "Unhalfbricking", and "Liege And Leaf".
Three bands in particular: Tunng, Espers and Midlake. Each coming from their own unique corner of the musical world and, curiously and (presumably) independently, landing in more or less the same place: Tunng from a place called, and for once fairly accurately, "folktronica" (and calling out the haters for leaving that place); Espers from a place where the rivers are busting their banks with extended psychedelic jams (and the haters are hating on them for leaving that place, too); and Midlake, well, not so long ago they were the unexpectedly fertile second coming of Fleetwood Mac. The haters are on them, too, I guess for not coming up with another "Roscoe" this time around. This, of course, is completely unfair: perhaps one in a hundred million bands would ever in their career come up with a song as special as "Roscoe". To expect Midlake to do it twice, well, it's asking a bit much really. The new album, despite what the blogging heads might think, has a lot going for it, it's just that what is going for it is different from what was going for "The Trials Of Van Occupanther". Sometimes it seems like in this world you are either damned for standing still or damned for moving on.
As for the prevalence at this point in time of Fairport love, it's a bit of a double-edged broadsword. On the one hand, these three bands (at least) are doing it for all the right reasons. On the other hand, in this hyper-accelerated Internet-driven world of wave upon wave of seemingly week-long trends it is never too long until somebody, or a hundred thousand somebodies, miss the point entirely and the entire mo(ve)ment jumps the shark. (Example: it seems like only yesterday that Underwater Peoples were captivating us with their blend of nostalgic cassettes-in-the-mail lo-fidelity doohickey; and suddenly everybody is doing it, with the usual diminishing returns.) As with other trends, the trick for the listener is not to throw out the bath water with the baby. These three are the babies you would be wise to grab hold of as they start to fly out the window.
[Written in some haste and not checked over. Heck, everybody else does that, don't they?]
