If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry

While I was pondering an expansion of notes on the last update on acquisitions I made, I realized it said "Here's an image," and I managed to forget to include an actual image! Well, that has been hastily (with shameful expression) corrected and can now be viewed, even in its full glory. Sorry about that!

Of course, I do that and I've long since opened the previously unopened titles appearing in those stacks and created an entirely new stack over the last week or so through thrifty poking about here and there, but for today let's take a closer look at the top of that first stack. I talked previously about how I find music, but this will address the details that lead to my often seemingly arbitrary decisions by looking at why it is this band or that album warranted enough interest to take up more of my rapidly diminishing space.

Too High or Too Low There Ain't No In-Between -- Extremity in Music

While a lot of my own musical development has been tempered by the peculiarities of the people I've known and the kinds of music I've grown up with in extremely disparate environments, often then coupled with the aforementioned peculiarities, I did not manage to avoid a period of "finding music to annoy other people and seem 'hard.'"

This did lead to my unusual foray into "nu-metal" in high school, wherein I took up bands like Static-X, Deftones, Tool, Powerman 5000 and various others who eventually proved that, while there are some bands that held to the sensibilities that defined that (intentionally disparaging, actually) genre name, a lot of them were looped into it in much the way that "grunge" never managed to accurately describe most of the bands still heavily identified with it--Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, for instance--in that they often managed to hit different ground quite rapidly, or even already hit different territory long before they became famous. Early Soundgarden, for instance, is very different from the album that broke them, Badmotorfinger.

Of course, while proponents of many of these bands--such as my best friend throughout high school, John--would note that grunge was a nonsense term and really referred to punk (Nirvana) and metal (Alice in Chains) bands if anything, it has stuck in its way. Other genres have done the same thing, with "emo" and "new wave" in particular starting from similar origins: offhand comments used to describe a group of bands vehemently denounced and disavowed by those bands.

Still, while many of the bands I mentioned have wandered into totally different territory, mellower in some respects if not all, they were, in that heyday, still quite abrasive and heavy as mainstream music went. Static-X self-describes as "evil disco" (not unfair considering the drum machine and drum-machine-like beats forming the base of their music), Tool heavily associates with progressive rock, even touring with King Crimson for a time, Deftones have entered some post-rock influenced territory on their last three albums and Powerman 5000 turned into a much more "normal" rock band and keep going through variant incarnations.