I’ve somehow managed to go 323 days into this project without listening to a single record by The Smiths. I figured that I’d be assigned a record of theirs for Dad Rock Tuesday at some point, but with the number of DRTs beginning to dwindle, I better just knock out a record of theirs on my own terms. As I’m sure you know, Wikipedia is blacked out today as part of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests, making my daily music research a little harder than usual. I’m not complaining, I don’t need no online encyclopedia to know just how big The Smiths are (were).
There’s just something about that ’80s/’90s English rock sound that I love. Well, most of the time anyway. From The Beautiful South to Belle and Sebastian, there’s been something for me in the majority of the stuff that I have checked out from this genre and era, excluding Joy Division.
With a very heart-on-sleeve approach to lyrics, and an emotional, albeit a little whiney, delivery, I have plenty to love about The Smiths. Now that I think about it, those are two characteristics that I look for in a lot of the new stuff that I listen to, even if they come about in fairly different ways. For example, you could apply the first sentence of this paragraph to the music of a band like Titus Andronicus, even though they sound nothing like The Smiths. It’s cool how things like that end up working out.
I shouldn’t say that I hate new wave—I’m starting to learn that it’s not all garbage.
Swole Ear 