Sometimes Pitchfork lays on the hyperbole a little thick. Admittedly, I do too, but when they say things like how Black Tambourine are on the precipice of being considered legends in indie circles just because they sound a little bit like some of the horrible twee fuzz-pop bullshit that they, Pitchfork, are currently promoting the fuck out of it, well, it annoys me. (The echo chamber, it echoes.)

For one thing, Black Tambourine sounds a lot more like the era they came from (the 90s) than they do anything else that's going on here. The guitars? Straight from the rigs of Th' Faith Healers. AllMusic declares that Black Tambourine are "among the truly seminal American indie pop bands of the 1980s", which is funny because Black Tambourine weren't even active in the 1980s.

They go onto say that Black Tambourine "pre-dates shoegaze" which also isn't anywhere close to being true, considering My Bloody Valentine's "Isn't Anything" came out 3 years before Black Tambourine, and Ride's "Nowhere" came out in 1990 (a year before Black Tambourine put out their first EP). Even back to Th' Faith Healers, who released two full albums of excellent grungy shoegaze-y female vocal alt rock and broke up before Black Tambourine managed to release two EPs.

I don't mean to establish that Black Tambourine isn't good---out of the epic barely-an-album 12 songs they recorded over four years, there are at least three decently good songs---but that I'm a little confused as to how some unknown and unloved bands get huge amounts of hype thrown behind their expired careers. Is it because of some guy, just like me, sitting behind a desk somewhere at a important music critic job who carries a torch for them?

In 20 years, will I be sitting in an important position somewhere and I will be able to say things like, "The Angry Orts are one of the seminal pop rock groups of the early 2000s, and clearly, today, in the 2030s, their influence remains strong!" and everyone will fall all over themselves, re-issuing Angry Orts records and conducting interviews with the confused former members about the profound impact they have had on modern 2030s music?

Maybe that's all it takes for a band to go down in history as important. It seems to me that if it wasn't for a couple loud voices, who would even know who Black Tambourine is? Two low-fi EPs and a slow fade into obscurity later, it seems unlikely that anyone would even remember their name, but here I am, discussing them on my blog.

Music history is a funny thing. It'll be interesting to look back on the 2000s and the 2010s and see what lessons we take from them. Who will we really remember? Will the 2000s be remembered as the decade of Coldplay and Britney Spears? Or will we remember it as the decade of Arcade Fire and insert the name of some other popular indie band? Or, like according to this mostly bullshit list will we remember the 2000s for acts like The Strokes (who'd the Strokes influence? Interpol? "Let's release one great album like The Strokes and then never make another good record ever again, just like the Strokes!"), The Danielson Famile (Seriously, who?), and Sufjan Stevens (who seemed like he'd be really influential until he was never able to actually release another album*)?

Maybe that's the trick to being influential? You release one good album and, ideally, fade away. If you're unlucky like The Strokes, you hang all your credibility and influence on bad albums...

I don't know. I guess we'll see. If I have anything to do with it, we'll remember the 2000s and the 2010s as decades where hundreds of bands no one has ever heard of were supremely influential upon the future of music. Everything I listen to, it's important, and you better jump on it now or else in 20 years you're going to be really confused. Everyone will be talkin' about me---I mean, the bands I post. Not me, just the bands.

Well, maybe a little about me, and how cool I was back in the day for listening to all this stuff. Maybe there will be a statue. A statue of me. Hmm... the future might be pretty cool...

* In defense of Sufjan Stevens, he is releasing a new album this year. I'm sure regardless of whether it is good or not people will masturbate furiously to it all over the internet. So much for The 50 States. (Edit: Hey, look, the new Sufjan Stevens leaked today, and everyone is already going on about how good it is... apparently he says "fuck" repeatedly on one song! How novel and exciting! People in the early 1970's won't know what to do with themselves.)

I lay on the snark pretty thick, but it's done with love, I swear.