lux

Great tip, I've already heard about the upcoming album, 10,000 Days. Do you think it will be released by the end of the year? The wait is excruciating.

It’s definitely not a 5, but it has an intensity, a dynamism, a remarkable ability to depict states of the psyche... no no, it’s a 5.

"I believe that as long as there are people who won't settle for the obvious, the pixies will have fans"---rock to my ears! Perhaps it's the band that more than any other has understood how essential it is to color music with a child's perspective.

From the cover, one can deduce the quality of the album.

Ah well, maybe now it’s all good after all, but it’s also a bit fair since there’s no longer a need for copycat bands of one another :-P

"I feel a thrill of pleasure when someone treats some discipline as a 'science' that to the common man has nothing 'scientific' about it..... instead, I feel a shiver of terror! :-O"

But in fact, when trying to remember something, the lyrics aren't even that bad, at least on their best albums. The point is that while it is true that you can be original without being innovative, it is equally true that I see nothing original in this album, not just nothing innovative.

As musicians perhaps, but not as artists.

"Sad fate for prog, a splendid genre, but destined to be niche"-----but come on, let's not say Berlusconate. In Italy even less so.

No, then you don't agree with me... I look at the how, not the what. Because it doesn’t make sense to judge the starting material, the genre, or whatever you want to call it. What's important is how you shape that material; I believe that today you could still play original Hard Rock - blues if filtered through a certain creative genius... I’m not talking about innovations, or historical importance... I’m talking about molding whatever you touch (anything) with your own Genius (if you possess it). Technical competence? I’m not interested... formal innovations (like Morphine, who some say are great because of their limited instrumentation... but come on, this is a premise that proves nothing, a technical assumption that means nothing in terms of Art. The point is that Morphine played Jazz in a completely Rock way, seamlessly; that two-string bass could be jazzy, but damn it could also be Rock, the Sax had a predominantly rock function despite its jazz matrix, etc.). There's the originality, there's Morphine talking about depression mixed with excitement, an abulic but warm tone, almost brushing against gothic doom (!) in a masterpiece like "Free Love". And they didn’t need formal innovations (which are interesting more for a historian than for someone aspiring to Art). I mean, I don’t know what to make of Sun Ra's Atlantis, for example; okay, avant-garde free jazz historically influential and fundamental, but where's the Art? Those tribal-cryptic cerebral self-referential pipedreams that represent me, I mean, what do they talk about, what landscapes do they draw? Does it take a genius to play that stuff? So I repeat, okay, History, but let’s also try to escape these pseudo-intellectual games for some bored and frustrated "critics". Then excuse me, but doesn’t Pere Ubu with The Modern Dance seem to have shaken up the new wave with that post attitude typical of the 90s? Didn’t My Bloody Valentine perhaps change the perception of psychedelia? Didn’t Throbbing Gristle innovate by bringing noise as a cornerstone? And Slint with Post Rock? And I’m only talking about objective innovation, not making value judgments on the bands... LaMonte Young with Dream House and those two pieces of three days each, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAA AAEEEEEEEEEEE for 40 minutes... what is that? Is he trying to make a fool of me? Then I believe that innovation does not always equate to Art; rather, it’s often synonymous with a “creative spark,” a “proto” something, that someone later in the future takes and culturally formalizes, turning it into a product that can be passed down in meaning, something that tells a personal vision of the world, not channeled into dead-end Tunnels that correspond to the cerebral abstractness typical of certain individuals with an oversized ego.