Cult Affections – Blood Drive
Whenever rich rockstars are asked what young musicians ought to do to gain the same kind of success, they always answer that the youngsters ought to treat their band as a business. That may seem sound advice, and who else would you ask rather than someone who has already made things happen? But the answer leaves plenty to be imagined.
The majority of bands treat their work as part of a business, and they also work as if they have a boss to which they need to answer. They write music that follows strict patterns, a clear format, and obvious rules. They try to imagine what their audience might want to hear and never break away from these assumptions. Ultimately, these bands torture their creativity out of the desire to make a buck.
Cult Affections are a little mean-spirited, a little wild, and not interested in reading the business manual before making music. “Blood Drive” ignores many of the rules anyway. It’s a dynamic, darkly romantic sound that plays both with silence and threatening levels of noise. It’s about murder and it is also about affection. All of these things, according to the book, might be confusing for a regular audience. But, the appropriately titled Cult Affections believe in the intelligence of their fans.
Herb’s Excellent Adventure – Man
The ideal of every musician ought to be to get to the point where they can use their instrument to play whatever it is that they hear in their head, and, then, to ignore it, and play something else. That is to say that the very best musicians have achieved immense freedom on their instruments but do not overreach, overplay, or abuse that freedom.
It must take a really long time to get to that level. And according to some of the musicians who made it, the summit is followed quickly by other mountains that need to be climbed. The journey never ends. But you need to start on it, and the vast majority of modern musicians do it by pressing scales and chord patterns that don’t necessarily move them closer to the goal of musical fluency.
What you can tell from hearing “Man” by Herb’s Excellent Adventure is that this is a group of musicians who has achieved that sort of musical freedom, no doubt, through hours upon hours of directed practice and through playing together. That’s how the music is so smooth, and the direction as clear as this.
The Dutch band has no band switching gears, moving from Chili Peppers-like funk to distorted Alice in Chains-type, grunge vocal harmonies or to the breezy hippiesque sounds that bookend the track. A lot of musicians might hear this in their head and wouldn’t be able to express it as well. Herb’s Excellent Adventure’s musicians probably have plenty more eccentric musical ideas roaming in their imagination, but they have the good sense of sticking to the essentials.
