It's been about a year since the germ of an idea started forming in my head, exactly what my "philosophy" would be when I started reviewing music. I hadn't even come up with the idea for this blog yet, but when I did, the approach I ended up taking was rooted in something that happened on the way home from a Halloween party in 2010.
I was on my way home the next morning, and I picked up one of Toronto's free hip indie newspapers. NOW, probably. In it, there was an article on Mangan, whose song "Robots," I was really digging. I hadn't had a chance to pick up the album yet. The article's thrust was that Mangan was an up and comer on the indie scene, with a growing fanbase and a couple of award notices: notably, his album Nice Nice Very Nice was a dark horse candidate for that year's Polaris prize. The article wondered whether this attention was warranted, referencing a review by Alan Cross calling the album "Bland, bland, very bland." This... this irked me.
Alan Cross is an extremely noteworthy Canadian music journalist, a self-described "professional music geek." His work with Corus stations like Edge 102 in Toronto makes him pretty much the lead tastemaker. He seems like a nice guy. But he's also got a gig with the chain of stores I work for, regular segments on the official radio station we listen to, introducing current hits with background information or trivia. He never voices his critical opinion there, or if he does, it's only vaguely, non-committally, and always supportive, even when describing generic radio pop, stuff critics don't usually fawn over, like the Black Eyed Peas or Britney Spears.
It seemed so disingenuous to me, that this titan of music journalism should make it his business to kick an up and comer back down the ladder. That he plays the critic card for someone doing his best to create his own sound and carve out his niche, while giving his tacit stamp of approval to the usual ubiquitous pop you hear everywhere anyway.
I mean, I get it: Britney, the Peas, Rihanna, Coldplay, they're all critic-proof. They're going to get radio play and they're going to sell records no matter what I think about them and no matter what Alan Cross thinks about them. That's fine, in fact it's great. I've often said Justin Bieber and Michael Buble are keeping us in business, even though I'd never buy one of their records for myself. Nothing wrong with that. But why discourage Mangan, especially when people, as the article pointed out, are responding to it? As I said with my Oasis write-up, no matter your own thoughts as a critic, if an act provokes a response from its intended audience, it works, and it's part of your job to figure out why, not merely to tell people they're wrong. Maybe to some ears, that first Mangan album was bland. But to a lot, it wasn't. And that write-up scared me away from buying the first album, since I was a lot more skittish about committing to buying music before this blog, and never came back to it since.
Aaaaaanyway, a year has passed and Mangan has a new album, and this is the single off it, which I personally have been enjoying. It begins with that pulsing verse and builds, much like "Robots," below, but with a bit more muscle, and those trilling U2 guitars. I know there are a lot of people who would like this song and probably the whole album, who wouldn't hear about it otherwise. Until I can get around to hearing the whole set, I'll let you decide for yourself whether it rocks. I think it really does, though.
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