Discovering music is too easy these days.
I remember being a blossoming music fan at the turn of the millennium, surviving off of the scraps of burned CDs from friends’ older brothers, scouring message boards for the scent of morsels buried deep beneath the underground, trudging through tectonic-slow download speeds hoping that the files I’m downloading weren’t mislabeled. Maybe if I was lucky, the hours of time I put into that single song would be good enough to bid me to get my parents to drive me to the CD store and hope that they actually had it so I could fork over as much as twenty-four bucks in the hopes that more than just that one song was good.
Compare that to the process by which I discovered Flaw by Iress. I loaded up Bandcamp, went to the “Doomgaze” tag, and clicked on the first album I didn’t already know.
It was this one, and it was glorious: a chimera of dark synths, molten guitars, plodding drums, and soulful vocals that sounded like someone accidentally hired Cult of Luna as My Brightest Diamond’s backing band, but it was too late to reschedule the studio time, so they just went for it.
Luckily, it totally works.
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