Sitting on my desk right now is School of Seven Bells‘ debut full-length, Alpinisms. It’s a promotional copy, coated with black-and-white photographs of the band, contact information for relevant parties, and information that the album will be released on October 28th of this year.
I’ve only had time to give the album an initial listen. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be pitching it anywhere or whether I’ll be writing about it in any sort of outlet, print, outline, or here. I can say, though, that my initial reaction is a good one — but then again, this album falls into the “eagerly anticipated” category for me. Just over a year ago, I reviewed their song “Wired for Light”, in the version that was posted on their Myspace page. Lately, following a lengthy conversation about contemporary music criticism with Maria Tessa Sciarrino, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I critically write about creative work, whether it be music, film, or literature.
More specifically, one of the things I’ve been trying to codify is what to use as a point of comparison when evaluating something. When I listen to a band’s song or an album, am I comparing it against that band’s earlier works? Am I looking at the previous work from the group’s members, trying to set up a historical continuum? Do I look into interviews with the band, trying to evaluate what exactly their own goals were with the recording — essentially, comparing the album with an idealized version of itself.
I don’t know whether any of these is the correct one, and I suspect I’ve relied on all of them at various points. What makes this line of debate come to mind now, however, is that several of the songs heard on Alpinisms appear in different versions elsewhere: “Wired for Light”, for instance, and also “Face to Face on High Places,” originally heard on a 12″ of the same name released by Table of the Elements.
When looking at an album such as this, how — if at all — do alternate versions of these songs affect your response? In 2006, I interviewed Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses for Copper Press. Prior to the release of their debut Everything All the Time, earlier versions of a number of its songs were available for download on their site, including a radically different version of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous “Funeral”. One quote from him (yes, it does feel strange quoting an interview I conducted, but hey…), I think, explains the issue at the heart of things:
As a music fan myself, I love those versions…. I think it’s so much more personal for people, because they get to make a choice between what it sounded like when it was originally conceived and what it evolved into over time. I really love when you have that option with bands.
Alternate versions of songs or entire albums are nothing new, from Smile to Extraordinary Machine, from Prince to Jeff Tweedy. But with outlets from Myspace to Daytrotter being more and more available for bands to debut previously unreleased songs, I do wonder whether we’ll see an increase in the number of critical takes on an album evaluating it in terms of alternative iterations of songs — and, depending on who you talk to, as that line between albums and collections of songs blurs, I suspect it’ll be a debate that will continue for some time.
