I was assigned a story about A.A. Bondy. This entailed talking to a real live music publicist who told me my admittedly long email address "wasn't making it easy for anyone." I'm lucky in the sense that Bondy isn't Red Wanting Blue or any of the more typical OSU bar bands the Lantern seems to cover. On the other hand, why I am writing public relations material for someone I really couldn't care less about? The whole practice of writing stories based on press releases and publicity contacts seems like a rather evil collusion for news organizations, even for the quasi legitimate stories of an "Arts Reporter." Bondy used to be in a pretty trite grunge "alt" band in the 90's called Verbena - here is the video for their big play into the mainstream.
I normally love (<3) nineties alternative music. But Verbena strikes me as hack work. Much the same can be said for Bondy's newer direction, that Dylan pose punk rockers often strike as they turn 30. There are some songs on his new album that I felt were good-ish... but it seems, like
Pitchfork basically says, a soulless recapitulation of a genre's motifs. When that genre is punk, okay maybe, when it is "roots, blues, country influenced, Americana, singer-songwriter folk," no. Definitely not. I haven't retired to the land of NPR and concerts for the DNC quite yet.
I do manage to mention Merge Records and Thomas Function as well as make an allusion to This Bike is a Pipe Bomb.
After "the jump" is the story I turned in.
And the
Lantern version.
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