Some criticism done with a :(
This is unusual for this blog, but I felt I needed to write a few lines about something I heard at the music conference Music & Media 2012 and the showcase festival Lost in Music in Tampere, Finland this weekend.
I was at the rock club Klubi/Pakkahuone this friday to see many artists play live, most of them for the first time. One of them was Antero Lindgren, who was chosen for the prestigious number one spot on the Future Dozen-list, compiled by the radio station YleX and the Rumba music magazine. I was quite happy when I heard that he was chosen. I really liked the two music videos I'd seen before and it felt different and fresh. I might revise that a bit now.
I had heard earlier that during the day, when the conference had a listening session of the seven "future dozen"-tracks sung in English, the foreign music professionals in the listening panel (including Kieron Tyler from MOJO and Billboard, and Hannah Overton from Secretly Canadian) gave some really harsh criticism to the Antero Lindgren-song that they heard. It was the track Mother, which I posted here. Don't know exactly what was said, but apparently it was boring and they didn't really understand why it was chosen at all.
My immediate thought was that they're not familiar with the context of it being played in Finland. The ambient sound on the Antero Lindgren-tracks isn't that common around here and we Finns do generally have a fancy for the melancholic and nostalgic, and both elements are well represented on the Lindgren-tracks that are made into videos. I wasn't too much bothered about the comments from people who do not live in the context of Finland and I didn't question my musical taste buds. People don't have to like everything.
But then came friday night at Klubi. Antero Lindgren steps up on stage to do the first song. It sounds off. In a bad way. He does have a certain sound, but he's singing off tune way too often for it to be enjoyable. I'm thinking: "Maybe he's just nervous. He'll probably get better further into the set." But then I realize that his band, especially the drummer, is lagging badly. These are mostly slow, ambient songs, but even a band playing songs like that needs to be tight.
In the end the whole thing became a disappointing mush of ambience without force, and even if there were some more upbeat tracks in the mix they didn't save anything because they just felt mediocre. Strangely enough after each song he got hearty applauds. "What the hell are they hearing?", I thought. I even saw some people singing along. Were they hearing something else? Something good? Very strange. To top it all off he ended the whole thing with a cover version of something that I've forgotten by now because it was just so bad. It didn't feel serious. At all.
All in all I was very disappointed and I started analyzing why I liked it before. I came to the conclusion that the songs Cigarette Stump and Mother are packaged very nicely with their videos. The songs suit the mood of the videos excellently and I still like them a lot, but that can't be reason enough to end up at the top of the Future Dozen.
Is the debut album called Mother any good then? I have no idea as I haven't listened to it myself, but I really hope the people who chose the Future Dozen have listened to it, because if they made their decision on the same basis as I concluded my first liking, they have made a bad choice. My guess is also that most of them haven't heard him live before and I wonder if there are any regrets by now. I can't be the only one who thought that gig was terrible! That would just be so depressing on behalf of the Finnish music press.
Now, I'm not excluding Antero from making a comeback as a better artist, but after hearing him live on Friday it has to be said. He does (and I'm really sorry to have to say this) not deserve that Future Dozen number one spot as there are way better artists than this to have on that list. He will probably not be an artist to reckon with next year.
:(
