Perfect Sound Whatever: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER by James Acaster

Author:James Acaster [Acaster, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2019-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Live + Direct

At the end of May 2017, Matthew Crosby invited me to go and see Jeff Rosenstock perform at the Camden Underworld. I came straight from doing my own show in Central London and arrived at the Underworld ten minutes before Rosenstock began his set. I was still wearing the blazer I’d worn on stage earlier that night (I went through a very brief blazer phase) and looked like someone’s dad. Matthew was wearing a cool T-shirt with a logo on it and looked like my son. Rosenstock’s 2016 album WORRY. was already one of both Matthew’s and my favourite albums of all time, and this gig was one of my few high points of 2017. It was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to in my life, and whenever the audience sang together I felt connected to other people in a way I’d not experienced in years. I realised at that show that it wasn’t just recorded music I’d been neglecting but live music as well.

I used to love going to gigs. As a teenager, watching live music felt like a religious experience, and that’s saying something considering how fully Christian I was. One of the first bands I ever saw live were My Vitriol. They were supporting a band called Cay at the Bedford Esquires in the year 2000, I was 15 and it was the second gig I’d ever been to. Their blend of rock and shoegaze got them weirdly labelled nu-gaze (it was around the time of nu-metal so calling things ‘nu’ was still acceptable), and they’d not even released their debut album when I saw them. They were my own personal discovery, the first band I’d been into ‘before anyone else’, making me better than anyone who came to the party late or jumped on the bandwagon. I saw them three times that year: in Bedford to hardly anyone, opening the main stage at the Reading Festival and finally to a packed room on their own headline tour, their popularity rapidly increasing as the year progressed. But it was short-lived: after the release of their debut album, a record that frontman Som Wardner felt he’d been rushed to finish, the band went on an indefinite hiatus and vanished.

Fifteen years later, My Vitriol released their first studio album since 2001, The Secret Sessions. It was only available for download on their website and had been funded by their fans via PledgeMusic. Everything about the album from the title to the way they went about funding and selling it pointed to a band that didn’t want to be the centre of attention or out in the field of competition ever again. They’d unarguably nurtured and honed their sound over time and done so exclusively in front of a dedicated fan base who had stuck with them during these self-imposed years in the wilderness (not the fans who assumed they’d split up and then rediscovered them because they’re trying to buy as much music as they can from 2016).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.