An axe to grind, out of love for an album
The Birthday Massacre's 2004 album, Violet, deserves better than a subscription-service review pulled from an antiquated company's dustbin
Many years have passed, and I’ve grown, and the source is long gone to me. This person introduced me to The Birthday Massacre, around 2010. This mixture of something not unlike contemporary dream-pop, with straight-up horror writing plus teenage romance, has an irresistible appeal to me now. I was an H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe reader as a kid. I didn’t follow up with reading contemporary horror, beyond the occasional bestseller. But one doesn’t need to be a horror fan to enjoy this music.
I want to talk about their 2004 album, Violet. I am a participant in an online music-sharing (not the Napster/Limewire kind) and discussion group, and I remembered being intrigued when I heard some of it. I looked them up, thinking I might share a song from the album.
But what got me to be writing, at 11:11 PM, after having lain in bed, listening to Violet, was yet another trash-talking, TiVo-branded review that Qobuz just sticks in the place a curated review catalog belongs. Why TiVo? Are they known, unbeknownst to me, as some kind of musical experts with great taste and open minds? I hated the review of this album—trashing this album—so much, that I had to come downstairs, keep listening, and write about it without doing it too much injustice. At least a lot less injustice than the pernicious reviewer.
First, the sonic signature is one of “dark” (more emphasis on midrange and low frequencies than on treble) smoothness, probably with a “scooped-mid” equalization profile. Not only smoothness, but the kind of catchy poppiness that I hear on some dream-pop and synth-pop albums being made now and recently, such as Horse of the Other World, by See Through Dresses, and the recent albums by Bad Hammer. Contrary to this album being an unsatisfactory “homage” to past musical styles and artists, as the TiVo reviewer would have it, this album was forward-looking while being of its time. First, “Happy Birthday” is dynamite. Its lyrics are disturbing to a tender-hearted person such as myself, but it is catchy as measles and I love it. Everything about it is done perfectly, as far as I’m concerned. It’s my favorite track on the album. In my memory, the entire album was songs as horror-themed as this one. The reality is more varied. Horror is a re-occurring theme here, but not even most of the songs resemble “Happy Birthday.”
It’s going to take me some time to digest the lyrics to, say, “Horror Show”—and I much prefer picking up the lyrics through repeated listening, to the liner-notes way of delivering an “official,” apparently cut-and-dried version of spoken and sung words. Especially sung words escape such certainty, in the types of art I enjoy most. And is it possible that what the singer wrote down is merely a best effort at what their creative energies produced as an art work to be realized through human implements? I have sometimes considered art to be just that. A film is as near, we can assume, as the actors, writers, director, producers, engineers, and even the best boy and key grip, and everyone else involved in what can be a massively complex undertaking, could come to a synthesis of the visions of these people— and not least the person in charge of casting, and the person in charge of wardrobe, and so on.
I generally avoid reading reviews of art works such as music and film. There are so many axes to grind, political platforms to prop up, loves and hatreds to work out, that it does not seem worth my time to sort through reviews, all of which color my opinion whether I like it or not, to find the wheat. In the case of Umberto Eco’s 1994 novel, The Island of the Day Before, after I had read (and loved) the book, I chanced upon a review written at the time the book came out. The then-35-year-old reviewer, a novelist himself, should have known better; but he impudently trashed what he could never hope to achieve himself. I learn things from such reviews (which, again, I avoid, as I avoid all reviews of art) I learned I never need to take seriously anything this famous reviewer says or has said, and I learned that a naive reader might have decided not to read Eco in the first place, ever—such was the juvenile thrashing this reviewer gave his work. When it comes to the Violet review, I haven’t owned a television ever in my life, so why would I rely on TiVo, of all sources, to speak well of art I might enjoy?
So, that’s my axe to grind. I’ve listened to most of the album twice. It goes by fast, and there are often no breaks between songs. There, I’ve just finished it. Going to listen from the beginning and see where I end up giving in to sleep.