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July 21, 2009
What Happens to Teeth, Motherfucker--
Many are probably familiar with that first track, Dream City, which bites just a tiny bit on T. Rex to my mind (esp. the beginning), but probably not with the second (and arguably better) track, Get Real. That Hockey Night album, Keep Guessin (on Lookout Records, I think), is a total gem. Although when I first heard it (after hearing the Free Energy track in May), I thought, wow, sounds like the singer really loves Malkmus a whole lot. But he doesn't sing like that in Free Energy now, at least not in the three tracks of theirs I've heard. What happened? I'd like to know. Perhaps Paul Sprangers grew supremely tired of being hit with the Malkmus tag and decided to sing in a totally different way. I've been thinking about this a little bit lately--the effect of criticism on an artist's development (mostly b/c of something John Banville said in this cool interview he gave for the Paris Review)--and the emergence of Free Energy as a bizarro classic rock band after the break-up of Hockey Night might be a good example of an artist's aesthetic trajectory being altered severely by the feedback he (they?) receives. I suspect, for no justifiable reason, that that third, unreleased Hockey Night album might've shown some more weirdness/individuality than is evident in the stuff that's being released in the lead-up to Free Energy's Stuck on Nothin' (or maybe not).
You can download Hockey Night's Keep Guessin here.
Posted by Kevin at July 21, 2009 08:15 AM