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Revolutionary Suicide
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Re: Revolutionary Suicide
May 28, 2013, 19:15
keith a wrote:
IanB wrote:
Pilgrim wrote:

"I’m an experimental artist, and true experimental art should be rendered obsolete by what comes next."


I have spent a fair bit of listening time the last six years trying to unlock these Problem/Black Sheep era Cope records.

Over the same period I have hardly played anything from the back catalogue apart from a few spins of Jehovahkill and Odin. Every time I think of playing him I reach for one of the new ones. And that's how they have come to be a distraction from other better things. At 21 or 31 or even 41 I wouldn't have cared. At 51? Fuck me listening time feels so much more precious.

A lot of the recent Copes have an oh-this-will-do slapdash feel to them and Kings of the Wild Frontier has as much to say politically. There is nothing much there that has stuck with me over time or even made me laugh on a second listen. And the metaphysics have gone (for a long walk) west too. Not that I expect any kind of new ground to be broken in rock n roll but I want more - more than this at any rate - if it is going to take me away from other things. So there's my problem with these records in a nutshell - there is nothing experimental about them and at the same time the quality of writing, playing, tunesmithery and production is all fairly C+ too. I don't "do" lo-fi except when a function of poverty. I think that, as rock aesthetics go, lo-fi as a style represents a major cop-out. Just like rock co-opting the sounds of the avant garde, it's often a veil over weak ideas.

Listen to anything from the last six years next to World War Pigs or Crying Shame and I think it is fair to say that there has been a shift in the benchmark and it hasn't been for the better. Pamphleteering at best.


As a general rule I think all Cope's 'proper' (the song ones, under his own name) from Rome... onwards sound better when you go back to them a year or so after their release. With the exception of Black Sheep which I thought was, for the most part, stunning pretty much from day one.




That's what I have been hoping and why I keep going back to them. Unruly Imagination was the one that I liked the best. Don't find myself whistling much from it in the street though!
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