Cut Copy, Zonoscope
Reviewed by: Chris Polley
Over the past five or so days, I think it’s safe to say that (like our own Chris Bosman summed up rather nicely yesterday) Radiohead have taught us that knee-jerk music criticism is the internet age’s bread and butter, and that just might not be the best thing for our collective audio digestive systems. Especially when we haven’t even heard what Pitchfork had to say yet! The troubling part with that last sentence is that I’m kind of not kidding. Now before you go away, I must make it clear that it’s been a long time since I’ve mentioned the P-word in these parts, despite it formerly being my go-to neurosis back during the infancy of this here site. With the very nature of qualifying the music enjoyment experience being up for grabs with this love-it-or-hate-it Radiohead debacle, though, I feel it almost necessary to enter Pitchfork into the conversation, because whether we like it or not, they are the definitive voice of the collective indie unconscious, whether I ignore it in my writings or not.
So here’s what happened with Pitchfork and Australia’s Cut Copy, the true subject of today’s review: Pitchfork, like they do so often, preemptively decided the band’s third record, the newly released Zonoscope, was a great, if not superb, album before much of the group’s fan base even heard it. I happened to be part of that fan base, and I simply could not help but take the staple indie bastion’s words as gospel, because it did not surprise me in any way that a band I loved would make a wonderful new album. Their 8.6 score burned itself into my skull and I automatically adjusted it for fanboy inflation to a 9.6 – stellar. Pitchfork could not do this for The King of Limbs, and we’ll see if the trajectory of tweets and Facebook statuses change when they do finally (c’mon, it’s been almost 120 hours, boys!) publish their review, but for now there is rampant uncertainty about whether or not Thom Yorke and co.’s latest is, you know, good. But Zonoscope was good before it even existed because Modular likely, like all good record labels, gave Pitchfork and many other like-minded second-tier sites a nice long lead time for rumination before it even needed to be hyped to the music-consuming public, much less its actual release date.
And despite this being a music criticism site, we are dissimilar to so many others because (and this isn’t a dig at our lovely editor, by any means, because I couldn’t care less how elitist and ahead of the game I am compared to you peon readers) us writers are on our own in obtaining and listening to the records and bands we write about. Does that make us more like “true” music lovers or just lazy in being players of the every-minute-counts new music masturbatory contest? If you couldn’t tell in my phrasing of it, I couldn’t care less about the answer to that question, but what I do care about is how it affects my reading and enjoyment of listening to the music I want to listen to in the first place. This brings me to my final pre-listening influence that led to my agony over Zonoscope: not only did Pitchfork extol the record’s virtues, but a close friend of mine and former writer for this very site, a one Daniel Wipert, told me it was one of the worst records he’d heard in a long time.
This is where shit gets heavy. Who do I trust more – the only music web site I half-heartedly check every day before I begin my work day, the close friend whose taste may not always align with mine but whose opinions I greatly respect, or, if you have to include this as an option, myself? Possibly asininely, I tried with all my might to go with door number three as I braced for impact, took a deep breath, and pressed play on iTunes. But as I listened, the predictable occurred. I could not help but think of how Pitchfork reminded me that it’s summer in Australia right now and how this music should be reminding me of sunshine and beach balls and oh man maybe they’re right! This is awesome! But then I got bored with images of bright skies and sparkling beaches running through my head, believe it or not, and began trying to engage with the sluggish dance music at hand. Suddenly Wipert’s words started echoing in my mind grapes like a bad TV movie flashback: “worst…record…long…time.” I became overcome with torpor and neglect. I wanted to press stop and try again later, so I did.
When I returned, I came back not quite as the “reviewer” yet, but as the Cut Copy fan. This was the band responsible for Bright Like Neon Love, a record I stumbled upon without a pre-tainted opinion whatsoever, which I slowly fell head over heels with as I became entrenched in the minimal effulgence of “Future” and the furious yet flowery pulsing of “That Was Just a Dream”. This was the same band that crafted a near-perfect document of this decade’s obsession with repurposing 80s retro-grooves into powerful and meaningful dream-pop in In Ghost Colours, one of the few records that my friends and I (Wipert included) could all agree on being the pinnacle of summer pump-it-in-the-car music for newfound carefree post-college faux-adulthood. There had to be some inch on the path that Dan Whitford and his crew were going down that shared some symmetry with my own.
Songs like “Take Me Over” and “Corner of the Sky” were the closest I came to fully embracing on this new listen through Zonoscope, possibly because they were the boldest and most similar to the ground covered on previous Cut Copy releases. Okay, I thought to myself. I have to give up on this idea that this record is just going to click with me on my first few days of absorbing it, I convinced myself. This obviously was not about falling in love anymore. This was about growing to love, if I was going to love it at all. And really, I’m still at this step, and yet I’m still going to have this review posted poste haste. Why? Because today’s my day to post on AudioSuede and well, I’m not about to come back to these thoughts and refine them.
Why? Because this is the internet, dammit. This is not where pop culture enthusiasts come to carefully develop theses and allow time to take its toll on the identity of the author or even of the text. Later we’ll become nostalgic of the things that matter, but right now we better have our opinions and we better have them quick. And while I’m not entirely sure how sarcastic I’m being right now or how much I really truly enjoy Zonoscope, and honestly, I’m not even certain if I’ll continue to give it fifth, sixth, or seventh chances, because I have other records to listen to. I have developed a taste, and this understated, overly lite-rock aesthetic just isn’t doing it for me at the current moment in time.
Ironically enough, I quite like The King of Limbs. It’s even more slight and off-putting, but I’m interested in hearing it for a fifth, sixth, and seventh time, unlike Zonoscope. So off I go, catering my music listening habits to my instincts and natural, honest inclinations. That’s the way it should be, and I’ll let the pieces fall into place later. As a music reviewer, however, I’ll keep trying to feign knowledge before everyone else, because you need to know whether or not something’s worth your time. Some might say we have nothing but time, but really, we have even more albums to listen to than we have hours in the day, and if this one’s not going to scratch your itch, you might as well press delete and try the next one.