Volume is a lost art in the music world.
Everything recorded today has to be as loud as possible for as long as possible—not in a “turn it up to eleven” awesome hair metal kind of way, but in a “let’s make sure every instrument in the new Lady Gaga single is played as loud as this computer program will let it go” kind of way.
Every new hit single that gets churned out is mixed to the point that you can’t distinguish any individual sounds in the song. All you hear on the radio anymore is a noisy pop blur that’s loud for the sake of being loud.
Once upon a time, volume was truly utilized in music. Every loud point in a song had an opposing quiet point. There were crescendos and decrescendos, adding a moving quality to the music that played out over and within the notes themselves. Play “Lithium” by Nirvana and compare it to any Nickelback or Seether song—the difference is staggering.
In the not-so humble opinion of this columnist, no band utilized the true power of volume more than Bedhead.
This is a band that would go from a murmur to a deafening roar in the same song, slowly building upon simple one-note melody lines until they finally exploded with the unparalleled fury of three electric guitars and a capo-clad bass pounding away at power chords, reaching musical zeniths so overwhelmingly powerful that they had never before even been imagined by the human mind, let alone attempted by human hands.
And they managed to make it pretty, too!
Bedhead is your quintessential “bedhead” music, something to put on for those mornings when you wake up at 8 a.m., turn off your cell phone alarm, and decide right then and there to skip all three of your classes today, because you just don’t feel like doing anything but lay around in your pajamas and high school gym shirt and wonder how many more skips it’ll take before your one o’clock professor really fails you this time.
It’s moving music for those days when you don’t feel moving.
It’s also astonishingly depressing. Imagine Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, only their words are turned to walls of amplified sound and thrown at you one by one until you can physically feel their pain.
“Too many successive nights of being miserable / Give one the sense to sense the invisible / I know you're in this room / But the air is too thick.”
Imagine those lyrics over three guitars playing off the same sad melody line, while a simple bass and drums combo trods somberly along behind it all.
Yeah.
Listening to this album is the equivalent of spending 48 minutes under the SAD lamp at Wellness.
Wait, no. What’s the opposite of equivalent? That’s what I meant. Because I’m pretty sure listening to Bedhead can singlehandedly give you Seasonal Affective Disorder.
If you’re afflicted, please don’t listen to this album. Or most of the albums I’m going to recommend for the next three-four months. Check back in when it gets warmer and I’ll tell you all about how awesome Bunnygrunt is.
For now, if you’re into amazing guitar rock that might take your mood down a couple notches, then Bedhead is the music for you.
- 11/7/10
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