I have been listening to Beat Radio (Brian Sendrowitz and various collaborators) on and off for a few years now and I will admit that I have never given him/them the credit deserved. I really liked ‘Sleepwalking’ from Safe Inside The Sound but I did not fully explore his releases and give them a fair chance. A few months ago I put a couple of his songs into a mix (alongside some of my favourite artists) and went for a run along the beach front in the cold. It suddenly clicked. What I had taken for an enjoyable listen with one or two ‘great’ songs was in fact a catalogue of top-notch albums and EPs with enough variation and lyrical depth to encourage repeated listens. Without wishing to unfairly categorize I would say Beat Radio is comparable to The Weakerthans in terms of feelings and themes, which is certainly no bad thing.
However cliche or pretentious my little anecdote sounds I think it highlights a problem with modern day music fans which must be very frustrating for artists who work so hard to produce high quality work. The ease of access to hundreds of thousands of MP3s has devalued the individual. If something doesn’t catch our attention straight away we can skip and download something else. Similar problems are now developing with books with the arrival of ebooks and various other heresies. Obviously it is partly the job of the artist therefore to ‘hook’ the listener but they go on the assumption that the listener is just that, listening. That evening on the dark beach, looking across the water at the lights on the shore, I was truly listening. Guess what? I was hooked. I think the author Jonathan Franzen’s defence of the printed book is pertinent for other art forms too. We owe it to the people who make music to give them a fair chance, especially those as diligent and productive as Brian Sendrowitz.
The songs which I ‘got’ were on the Teenage Anthems album (notable ‘Teenage Anthem for the Drunken Boat’ and ‘Sunday Matinee’) but since I have also fallen for Golden Age (check out ‘Cold War’ and ‘Evangeline’) and am now exploring further. A new EP, reassuringly titled Hard Times Go, Part 1, was released in January and is worth your time. Most of the releases are on Bandcamp digitally (for peanuts) or as physical copies. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
– Jon –