9/24: THOMAS + Owen Pallett Concert Review, Part 1

A blog is only worth the voice of its speaker; softspoken, hardtyping folk will suffer a hardsoftmind. Lots of my thoughts about this show will need to find another home than an outpouring over a setlist. This is true: the intimate environment, the genesis of a long tour, the retooling of much new material, and Thomas' greater role made the experience...something else, something else. Something new. SOMETHING FUCKING FANTASTIC.

THOMAS: 1) Betty Carter cover ("Music can come from nowhere...")
2) ??? ("...dusty Springfield...")
3) Gwen Stefani cover ("It's hard to remember how it felt before...")
4) ??? ("Jenny's gone home again...")
5) Justin Beiber cover ("Everybody's laughing in my life...")

Talking with Thomas is just a generally good idea. He's an open dude, and you get a lot of cool tidbits in conversation (invite-only record stores, preference for baritone guitar, status of his EP). Being asked to perform on the fly seemed to jar him, and so the transitions between the lovingly-daubed guitar chord cycles were unclear, cut off at the first verse, or just felt unfinished.

But the man rose to the occasion and did a beautiful job transmuting pop/alt-pop covers into new spaces of multifunctional chords and a soaring, tender voice. The way he crafts harmony and melody is a lot less clear than Owen's writing, and his use of motive is either non-existent or highly hidden, peeking out of the density of his movements.

Yet that density, and that attention to harmony and melody, are things that Owen embodies in his music as well. They're great patners in that light, and Thomas' inspired skills on bass, guitar, and percussion are an incredible and increasing asset. Also: Thomas' voice over his sound caves is incredibly vulnerable, often inaudible or only mouthed or whispered. Owen, in his turn, takes an incredible risk in the placement of his melodies within the structure of his tunes. He sings with it. In any case, these covers resembled "Love Is the Candle" most from Self Help, but the experience was much more expansive.

Interesting to filter it through a cover medium, too. Thom mentioned how it allowed him to place meaning into a song without being bound to it. It also allows someone to connect to the song in a new way, giving him the strong power to, as he did genre-wise in the weirdo pop of Self Help, redefine the terms of engagement for these pop songs, and pop at large.

In sum: Thomas' music seems to be about insertion into a structural void, in the way that chords don't necessarily follow from each other, but in recognizing the fact and consequence of their general out-of-place-ness, strive to give meaning and turn to a phrase. It's a timidly sort of constantly trying music, flitting beautifully around his vocals which somehow teeter on the edge of whispers and words. Ethereal isn't the right word, since there's so much purpose in it: so much melody! and some emergent harmonization! and so much...pop! What a perfect fucking compliment for Owen's music.

Owen Pallett
1) E is for Estranged
2) Don't Stop
3) This is the Dream of Win and Regine
4) Midnight Directives
5) Flare Gun
6) The Butcher

In the sketch of it, a pretty standard set. 3/4 "new" songs, and the typical strong songs from all of his records. Don't Stop in spot 2 was a great choice, I think; the energy of the quiet opener drew out over this dance tune, climaxed over Win and Regine, and balanced out with Midnight Directives, effectively setting a diverse and inclusive 4-song opening bit.

The set was almost entirely segued, except for necessary instrument changes; even then, Owen took an extra verse on Scandal to allow Thomas to finish tuning up. Maybe that's just Owen's tendency to rush, which could be corroborated by how quickly he's playing older tunes. It creates a string of performances whose effect is powerful, and whose segues were often perfectly executed, without grace cycles to correct mistakes or gain momentum/confidence.

That didn't mean that their weren't mistakes, including a "wrong button" moment here or there. I hastened to compare to the last show I saw them on, where they had just come off a break, embarking on a long tour, and the last song had some sort of huge breakdown which was really ok by the audience (then a performer error (?) on a This Lamb Sells Condos encore, and here some sort of broken sound device which cut out the polyphony on the climax of Lewis Takes Off His Shirt), in reasonably intimate venues. And yet this show had some sense of...comfort. Maybe it was the not-official scheduling, the acceptance inherent in a college show, the small and beautiful venue, the lack of pressure to open especially to a Rock Band's Set in a Rock Band's Venue with a Rock Band's Crowd. To be fair, Thomas was freakin' a bit from the sudden opener-ship himself, but Owen was so smooth, man. So smooth.

Smooth a lot like the new pop textures that treated the new songs, beginning with Don't Stop. What struck me most was the accompaniment: somewhat how comfortable, in this song and others, Owen is with killing tonality; but mostly how mature the harmonic textures were. The recorded version definitely added some new harmonic structure, and so it sorta stuck out by being "new." But...I feel Owen as a melodic composer, someone who could look at any texture and write a beautiful, expressive, complex melody over it. To go even further, I'd argue that his musical harmonic textures are often really, really basic; that's a good deal of what makes him a pop artist. But even these "poppy" cuts rejected from Heartland have wildly inventive harmony, and many of the songs tonight had new or just newer sounding harmonies (Estranged being one, and beyond the beautiful dynamics and harmonization I have little else to say on it).

Taking this harmony thread a little farther...Thomas' bass addition on This is the Dream of Win and Regine is just another way of giving the accompaniment more power, more flexibility in the hands of (a) a skilled guitarist, (b) an often harmonically ambiguous songwriter, and (c) a non-looped, highly adaptable musician. But what is melody to Owen? Is it...does it change from a simple expression of statement to a more complex yet brilliantly clear movement across textures? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

Just like the dynamics in Estranged or the climax of Dream, the fucking pizzicato on Midnight Directives was extraspectacular, drawing catcalls from all across the audience. Still don't like the sound-clutter that the organ introduces, but yeah. I paid far more attention to the bass and rhythm in this song. Thomas follows the Bass pattern very closely and sophisticatedly on the wood blocks, and helps to create a jerky sort of syncopation...or maybe just increasing density, another noble goal.

Flare Gun: Owen bows the riff like a hawk descending on whatever upon which hawks descend. The sonic/atonal/rhythmic density of the piece, which is characteristic of Heartland I guess, was a thread that I struggled with a lot during the concert but could never flesh out. What does it mean to have dense music? The effect was at least stunning, and major fucking hell yes on the basswork on that tune.

The Butcher: and all the ways he uses that bow, how he seems to have explored all the possibilities that one can explore in sounding a violin. Sonic experimentation is present everywhere in quiet ways around his music, in a way: looping itself, repatching certain taps on the violin to sound like snares, bowing on the bridge, glisses and pizz, hitting and smacking, shouting into the pickup...it at least betrays the curiosity of an ambitious musician, who strives constantly to bring new character to his music and live performance (ex: the throwaway mellotron-voice riff that he added to LTOHS in Boston, after not using the patch on LTA, seems to have stayed...why?). Thomas is such a great cushion for that, in following the cycles of the music, adding chords and picking Owen up. Or, being picked up. Hehe.

Suburbs/Month of May and Album Playlist of the Half-Month

I'll start with the small news:

Just like I've had the same playlist stuck on the "Now Playing" thing on my Zune , I like to switch it up every so often...like every half-month. So I'll pick a random point in the alphabet and harp on it, giving short thoughts or longer ones maybe baby.

This week:

Wilco: "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"

My dad was the first one to get me into this group/album, so my first memories of it are from a few long car rides, and listening to orange-tan colored rock music tinged with something I couldn't recognize. Second was drumming on "Jesus, Etc." and not realizing it was from this album, and then I started getting into it again. For the last instrumental concert of the year I played drums on "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" with 6 kids from the Jazz Band...it was hard, but really special. The entire album is easy to listen to but hard to pick apart, not only lyrically but in musical motifs beyond the trite "music/noise." What I feel in it, though is a hotel filled with resting anticipations and wishes, trying to free themselves and taking weirdly-lighted trips out into the "real world."

Wrecked Machines: "Worried World"

It's...good trance? I didn't give it too many listens but I felt like I was listening to something more artful than a lot of dance music can do for me.

Dosh: "Wolves and Wishes"

Probably the favorite stuff on the playlist. I first got suggested it asking around on /mu/ for music that used music boxes, and heard it again at a religious conference. Some of the rhythms and energy remind me of Akron/Family, or some of the hip but none of the hop of Avalanches, or none of the catharsis and all of the energy of Explosions in the Sky. Hooah. Beautiful rambling instrumental music, I could dance to this for ages.

Patrick Wolf: "Wind in the Wires"

I'm not a fan. I enjoyed it at first when I was able to follow the drama of it. And it's all about drama, the kind of suspension of disbelief that an album about Gypsy Kings and the Shadowsea and all sorts of fantasy characters to take place. But really, once you take all the sexy club-style bass out of "Libertine" (which I had to do, on the train), what I'm getting is a lyrically freewheeling musically dry set of stuff. Like, listen to Tristan with the bass low. That's what the album is for me, funky but dead. Then set the bass way up and rock out to it.

The Unicorns: "Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?"

I think there are only two songs in the world that are perfect, fully perfect, that nothing could be done to them to make them better. "Tuff Ghost" is one of them ("Swans (Life After Death)" is the other, heheh). I either see this album as a half-assed concept album or a pretentiously thrown-together set of songs trying to be about death, but some of the songs just kill. What's weird about it is that even though I feel the album's concept teeters a lot, the songs are so strange in form (the abrupt ending of "I Don't Wanna Die" or the long unbalanced jam of "Child Star") that they lean on each other a lot to make sense, so there is a flow. I'm overharshing the concept, too, it's not that...argh....I guess just like Islands' first album, this is really about making music, musical death and creative death and life, and I should just feel the flow. And I do. Oh I do. You can't cause I'm already dead.

Lunar: "Wall of Sound"

Is it sad that I can say that this is one of those "classical/electronica bands who don't do much for publicity and release all their music online for free" and not be alone? A lot of their music feels tired, especially when the instrumentation strives to give the music a "classical feel" in an otherwise techno song. But in terms of soundscapes and crafting...pillars of sound...they do a nice job. Some of the songs have creative strokes of real weight, too. It does happen. Just...overproduced blagh.

OK OK OK BUT NOW even though the news has broken ARCADE FIRE'S NEW SINGLE TIME.

The first thing that identifies The Suburbs as an AF song is the rolling saloon-style piano chords over the bass and drums, with maybe a distant wail of strings, in an airy sort of production style that you can't mistake from Neon Bible. More archetypes in the lyrics: suburbs, driving, mother, bombs, lost feelings, kids, family. And the suburbs! Didn't we spend a whole album on that one?

Stuff's different, though. In Funeral AF did all they could to show the reasons to paint and reject these suburbs, from the dysfunctional relationships to war and loneliness and lots of driving and water and leaving places. In coming back to this topic, though, we're breaking through the stark and wildly colorful funeral picture into something even stranger: the dead body of youth, after it left. We're exploring what Neon Bible seemed to have so strongly left behind, to travel into realms of political commentary and loss in an ocean of negative media influence.

Instead we're right into the memories, not the present or the future but the past.Moving in your mom's van, what Funeral implied is now facing us in The Suburbs: we can't escape this past, and even if the feelings go past the memories stay and kids are still screaming screaming screaming. Who knows what it means now. It was all about the childhood gestures of drawing lines between us and them, screaming and yelling, getting hard, and getting bored with it all. Did it mean anything? Ever? The loss of Funeral was the idea and meaning of youth, but surfacing from the hard-life torment of Neon Bible, they look back and the loss has mutated into something else. Something else. Something else. Still screaming.

That's exciting fucking territory to travel to. What excites me even more is that even though AF released the title track of the work, we know from Neon Bible that the title track is only an exposition, a quick look into what an album is doing. I'm not sure that there are musical frontiers here, but it reminds me most of a slowed-down verison of "Poupee de Cire / Poupee de Son" cover from the Split 7" with LCD Soundsystem. Maybe some of "Cold Wind," actually a whole lot of "Cold Wind." Usually Arcade Fire songs can be thought as pure crescendos from A to B, but with this cut the beat's always on the same, and what gets added is a bit more melancholy. The descending electric guitar, synth wails, and strings that lay suspended in the air crying out under the harsher electric bass and (really well done) drums. Acoustic guitar thoughout is a great touch, adding a folky touch. The piano always plays the same progression diatonically, but it morphs it into more spaces...the weirdo major turn earlier in the song becomes a morning pedal point, drilling drilling drilling already past already past. The song breaks maybe a lit of mold, but mostly it takes everything Arcade Fire has done so well and puts it into a 5 minute romp/funeral march. Maturity is here, and also a lot of confusion.

If Month of May had xylophone in it, you could tell it was an Arcade Fire song. I...I can't even...not right now...maybe later...

Random Concerting, and Why It's a Sort of Okay Thing

Although I keep track of my favorite artists through livekick (a wonderful tool; I downloaded iTunes on my windows partition on the pc just to export the xml library into livekick, and I hate Apple!), some of my happiest moments have been concerts somebody has said to be "Hey, shit, wanna come to this concert?"

Best memory like that was Tuesday last November. I was talking with a senior I sort of knew, hanging out in the Chem Lab doing problems and generally chewing the fat. He mentions how he's going to the Of Montreal concert tonight, front row seats. I say I'm happy for him, I know them vaguely. Later in the day, I'm walking down the hall expecting for another frustratingly long night of homework, and passes me by and says "Hey...my friend who bought the tickets isn't here...uh, you wanna go?" I jump on the opportunity...and suddenly we drive into Boston to see Gang Gang Dance open for Of Montreal. Blew my fucking mind, Kevin's a great showman. His wife painted my face and stroked my face with a whip. The senior kid had some vegan cake they were passing about, and got sick. We talked about music, and he clearly identified himself as the kid who jumped on one indie craze and moved to another after a few weeks (modern Flaming Lips, Neutral Milk Hotel, Of Montreal...that's sorta unfair, he had some Lou Reed). But yeah, I randomly got to go to a concert of a group I didn't know. Gang Gang Dance is now one of my favorite artists, and Of Montreal is up there.

I've had a lot of good experiences seeing concerts of groups I didn't know. The OM concert I jumped in was totally out of the blue, and that was pretty fun I guess. The Anti-Flag show was really really great, even though I didn't know much punk at that point. I saw Sigur Ros just when Meo Sud debuted, and it was an amazing show and I was able to connect with it, even if I only knew Svefn-en-Genglar (err) and some of (). The symphony shows I sometimes go to don't really count, I suppose; but there's been a lot of fun to be had from just saying SURE YES I'LL GRAB THESE TICKETS or I'D LOVE TO GO IN PLACE OF YOUR FRIEND! And I make sure to pay it forward by rarely letting people pay for tickets I buy.

But...damn, there's always something lost. The Black Moth Super Rainbow concerts I've been to have been really wonderful, but I'm just not that well-versed in their entire discography. I'll here a cut here, a cut there, and I'm left to admire these wonderful soundscapes that I...really don't have any emotional connection to. I saw Radiohead and that was fucking AMAZING...but I hadn't checked out In Rainbows before going. It's not like I didn't enjoy everything and wasn't transported by it; but I couldn't understand how much of a religious event it is to see 15 Step live. And some shows just fall flat. I try to give music a chance, but it gets hot in clubs, and I get thirsty and it's too distorted to hear. I spent the majority of the Down concert sorta...hanging out in the back, half asleep. There's so much loss in just going in blind; I'm trying to make sure to listen to the headliner, and the last opener, before going, just for context (kinda failed for Jemina Pearl, though. Eh.)

I bring this up because there's the annual Mighty Mighty Bosstones show that my sister and I might like to go to. I guess it's more about if I want to be in proximity to my sister.

My Love Affair With Sufjan Stevens

So there's been a lot of activity on the Sufjan front. He's touring a bit, and he has two new releases but no new material. It's ironic to me that his two releases are so...retrospective.

Run Rabbit Run is a string version of his strange and wonderful Enjoy Your Rabbit, 14 electronic instrumental songs filled with rhythmic weirdness and fascinating rhythms (for a sample, check Year of the Boar segueing into Year of the Tiger). I think he's referenced a zodiac-themed album as a sort of stepping stone: his use of the names of the zodiac represent his own inability to find names for songs, to define and encapsulate a song in a title. A Sun Came! is weird and very experimental in a sometimes good, sometimes bad way. Despite his maturity in Enjoy Your Rabbit, there was more to do before he could become the "Titles longer than the song itself" master. To have Osso redo the album is to re-recognize that stage in his career: the experimentation, the difficulty to name and to encapsulate, the density and difficult of his works.

Ironically, Michigan and Illinois (I don't know seven swans that well, so I won't talk about it) are all about encapsulation. Using long titles, and a whole state as a concept, subjects filled with both researched and experienced feelings and events. The Michigan project got him going into this vein, and he was so enthusiastic to contain everything in song that he took 3 discs, two from Illinois and one from the Avalanche, to paint everything he could. He wanted to paint the entire fifty states, using his inquisitive and emotional outlook to take everything in, everything. He wanted to put true experience into his melodic, often sparse, often acoustic, often plaintive and simple style: the exact opposite of his early career.

The BQE is a mix of the two. Exploring the subject of the Bronx-Queens Expressway, Sufjan is again trying to contain an abstract in song. But he's not picking such a large subject as New York (he had mentioned New York as the next possible state subject, at one point), but rather something a bit more managable. He is using a mostly acoustic medium to try to contain all of his spirit, but he uses electronic sounds and eschews vocals. He divides things into names, but also relies on classical format and divison: Prelude, interlude, movement. It's less an album than an orchestral suite, a huge undertaking no longer limited by his own skill at his 5+ instruments.

Maybe this was always the fate of his music. One of the most striking things about Michigan to me was the use of electric hums between songs, and the fleeting, highly distorted guitar solos. Illinois ended with a nonvocal track, and had all sorts of nonvocal interludes, with a bit of electronic styling in it. Avalanche was a bit heavier in that respect. He threw in a track on Dark Was the Night that was all electronic...I dunno, seems to me like he's been itching to get back into the instrumental suite style. But will it work? Returning from his highly popular, melodic and environmentally evocative music, will it work?

FUCK YES. It works brilliantly. Unlike perhaps some of his other albums, you really have to devote energy to actively listening, otherwise you might say: "Absolutely nothing happens in this album until Movement 4 when the crazy electronics come in." I'm only halfway through the album and I am seriously in love with it.

The Prelude on the Esplanade is a sonic gem, a tone exploration of shouting cars and difficulties, flitting around tonalities of sort of major keys, enticing us onward and crescendoing, brought onward and onward and onward until this brilliantly tonal fanfare. At first, I was disappointed with the fanfare when compared to, say, The Black Hawk War [yadda], but I'm getting more into it. The chords arc up over the tonal center, and fall back down. He tells us: getting on trains is awesome, yo, but you gotta get somewhere too. Feelings of movement are given a real tonal, and not just crazy noise, center. The horn work is phenomenal.

So we're on the train now, I guess? And we get very quiet and artful pieces. Invaders stands out very strongly against the others, in that those three notes at the end of each phrase are like a horn, or a siren. Throughout the piece, horns and woodwinds take and let go of that carrying call, and the drums stop pausing behind it and time itself seems to stretch a bit. It's a fantastic piece of work, beautiful sense of growth in it. The first few songs I remember less well, but they're in the same vein: melodically genius, sonically enthralling, quiet and exciting.

But hell, Movement III into Movement IV is probably my favorite thing to come out of speakers ever. Seriously. Horns in III take their sweet times, using the space and uncertain time signature to create a sense of...I dunno, a clearing filling with trees that slowly grow and intertwine. You figure out it's in 7/8, certain horns take that little embellishment at the end of a phrase, but there is still so much growth and tension. Those embellishments don't fall on the beat, and it's hard to tell how many horns are playing at the time. Unlike a lot of his Michigan music, the complexity doesn't come from the interlocking of simple, melodic lines; everything is dense as fuck. You get a sense of buoyancy from it, though, a sense of rising to something; those embellishments become a symbol of clarity, those 7/8 phrases get a bit more clear. We're rising, drums and more bass sounds come in, instruments shift to maybe create a hole in those dense interlocking branches, and suddenly, suddenly HOLY SHIT WE'RE GOING LIGHTSPEED. It's like Rainbow Road in Mario Kart or something. It's a totally different sonic texture, choppy and hyperactive, and just like in the best parts of Enjoy your Rabbit, oboes and beats mix really well. I imagine myself speeding down a highway at like 125 km/hr dancing and running and rolling and all sorts of things. It's a huge climax, but strangely he's not afraid to put on the breaks and take away density. He understands that the sounds themselves make the tension here; so he'll through in off-color notes and bits of strange tonality that create excitement and direction, and POOF it'll go back to that part with the oboes. Incredible stuff.

I'll post more when I have a greater opinion. I got inspired to listen to Sufie because of a road trip through Illinois and Michigan.

Also: NEW FUCK BUTTONS ALBUM, MY DEAR GLORIOUS CLOUDS YES.

Classical Music: Fuck Yeah!

My teacher and I were delving into a Chopin piece I'm working on, the raindrop prelude (awful name), and not just technically either: we talked a lot about singing, about weight and the transfer of weight, about tone and pulsing tones, about direction, about syntax (holy shit "tempo rubato actually means stolen time...what a wonderful imagery), and most of all about silence. The use of silence which surrounds a piece in the beginning and the end, and the way pieces flow from that: does it break the silence (Polonaises)? does it flow from it (Db prelude)? And even more vitally, how does the piece interact with silence over its course? Tempo is a means of pushing away silence, but the composer can interlace silence with the pattern of notes notes, but the color, the tempo, the everything! So much of 20th century experimentation, like the concept of color-tone melody or Klangfarbenmelodie, was about redefining the nature of the way notes interact, and silence plays a huge role! I thought of Webern, among other composers...and my mind turned to the likes of Grouper and Lichens, and the way they play with silence and repetition, with only a guitar, a sampler, and a voice.

That in turn got me thinking about the role of classical music in society. In American culture, at least, there's such a sense of...elitism attached to it. People are astounded at the high prices of good Symphony seats (I'm going tomorrow ftw), and yet shell out so much more for front-row concert tickets. There are a lot of explanations for why...because of the elitists who claim it as the only true form of music?...because of America's desire to overthrow what was a very European culture, and attempt to redefine it with jazz (huge goddamn irony) and rock'n'roll and pop and all?...because of all the intellectual pressure some music puts on its listener?

And this isn't the modern period of "classical music" that's typically referenced, it's your Baroque, Renaissance, Romantic, and slightly post-romantic stuff that's focused on! All the big names of the past ages. Mozart noticed, Wagner peeked into, and Schoenberg blew wide open the peak to all this atonal shit that can clear out concert halls. The sometimes super-intellectual and dense and distant, the sometimes ugly, the sometimes rapturous and jaw dropping and terrifying sets of sounds that can be passed over, so quickly, as experimentation and junk. And that's not just Europe! Starting with Ives and going into Cage, music feel deep into experimentation far beyond anything in Europe: in the '50s, the aftermath of WWII left dozens of huge names in California, and in the '60s electronic music created a generation of musicians like mathematicians or scientists. There were pieces written that were silence (and motionless Dance accompaniments to them), pieces that comprised of fists smashing keys, music that was all made on tape reels, compositions based on Chinese divination techniques, music scores that were a sentence or two, music that consists of 40 or so violins playing the same note, and slowly, one by one, diverging until a 40 note chord fills the speakers. It's unbelievable! It's horrendous! It's exciting! It's experimental! It's American! It's so rich and can be so amazing! But nobody notices!

Even as folks like Gershwin and Copland tried for the popular feel, there was a retreating faction of composers who retreated into their darkened studio-laboratories. Minimalists like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, who tried to reduce all of music to its corest elements, are despite their attempts still far away from the popular stream. Thus pop music became the norm, and

I'm not saying that any sort of musical degeneration has occurred. That's a bullshit deconstructive useless thing to say! I have a lot more Beatles, or Islands, or Sufjan Stevens, or Bjork, or Ry Cooder, or Anti-Flag, or Sun Ra, or Nine Inch Nails, or mine and my girlfriend's stuff combined than I do Schoenberg or Mozart.

But man, doesn't the stereotypical maniacal, calculated, unemotional, sadistic villain enjoy a dash of classical music while he's slipping on his stereotypical black leather gloves? Isn't the classically-focused elite so often, so joyfully, and so enthusiastically satirized or rejected by pop music, folk music, punk music, metal, noise...despite the fact that the language they use is so similar? Cadence, rhythm, tonality and all that...they're the same!

What I'm saying is, classical music has a really unjust stereotype. Not every band you hear on the radio is worthwhile or interesting; not every one of Mozart's symphonies are amazing transcendent automatically beautiful pieces. That's nostalgia. People have never, ever stopped making good music. But I wish people would search a bit more, and just find certain pieces that really speak to them. To find a way to ignore all the criticism and analysis of classical pieces, as you've learned to ignore that reedy 20-something who runs the counter at your local record store.

There's just so much richness to be found! Why hold yourself back?