I reread a lot of old issues of Plan B magazine before creating this website, because of course I did. "It's very much of its time" is a non-statement, but sometimes we need to breath in and out, don't we? Anyway, I was surprised by how close their review of In Advance of the Broken Arm got to the notes Stern kept while making the album. Here's kicking_k, writing in issue #20:
Meanwhile, there was a friendly debate on the Plan B boards recently about journalistic clichés and excesses. One poster suggested we declare war on the inappropriate use of sense adjectives, tying them to their appropriate physical root. My response: “But writing about music is pretty much applied synaesthesia!”
(04/02:22) Riffs as fractals, solo as zoom. Rhythm track not 0101010111 stop-motion but quantum jump-cuts, variable tempo in general so sweetly judged, feels driven not by mathematics but the swell of chemicals. “I’m a contender/Never surrender (x3).” (06/01:28) Incredible intuition between players, vocoder panorama. Melodic hollows lock to now like a kiss with teeth.
It’s four in the morning. There’s a thesaurus the size of a kid’s thorax to my left and an ongoing Wikipedia search behind this Word window. If I sound like a loser, fuck you.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Writing about music is applied synaesthesia. Writing about music is amateur telepathy. Some of this is true. Some of this is dangerous. Some of this is dangerous because it's true.
Some buildings make you want to dance. Some music makes you see buildings. Sometimes the right sounds can fool you into thinking you are linked to your fellow humans by more than crude biological need and social circumstances. I'm not new here. I can quote sarcastic professors on the topic.