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 Caught in the Carousel - Music Reviews and More
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The Little Heroes
Cinematic Americana
Wednesday Records
Abrasive band name that brings to mind a film about animated toy soldiers: strike. Avowed circle of tunes which are deemed Billboard-worthy (according to the promotional sticker festooned across the face of the jewel case): strike. Emphatically bad song titles which would lead one to infer that what sits before you is really "heartfelt": strike. I felt doomed before I even listened to "Cinematic Americana" by the Little Heroes, despite the soft and lustrous hues of its cover (which in no way adequately conveys the sound of the band behind it). I have, admittedly, a petty and perhaps malformed prejudice against music of this bent—pop music which cloaks its frivolity under a large, suspect layer of sincerity. To lay bare the extent of my dislike of this kind of music (and on a somewhat larger scale, to reveal precisely just how crude and cynical I am), I began cringing aloud and emitting muffled squeals of indignation as I read the lyrics book. Insufferably bland and non-descript music, verily interchangeable with every other band of this ilk, is nothing short of musical terrorism. The promotional sticker which adorns the cd case is unjustly deceptive, for there is nothing "genius" about repetition. Little Heroes seems to typify the large nefarious wave of light-hearted, non-substantive dithering so commonly found in popular music. It sounds like Duncan Sheik, James Blunt, confusingly Toad the Wet Sprocket, and whatever else you can name that is desalinated, unimaginative and liked by a vast section of young people (10 years ago the Wet Sprocket allusion would apply...I'm an old man). Its complacency and mediocrity is offensive, it is criminally unimpassioned without any redeeming qualities. I would not permit my cats to hear it. If you listen closely towards the end of the record, you can hear the thin filaments and hoary bristles of an industrial-sized broom sweeping soundly across the floor, scraping the remnants and last vestiges of invention from the collective bottoms of all the barrels in the world.
Apparently, we have effectively run out of ideas and are resorting to such acts of self-sabotage and desperation, permitting ourselves such an ethical malfeasance as to allow the manufacturing of such dull and sterile music. It's not that it is awful really, it's that it is the same as everything else. It takes derring-do, cunning and outright guile to be truly, startlingly bad--to be so brazenly sapped of talent, and to expose an unsuspecting audience to it is nothing short of subversion. Being without talent is at least something, whereas blind assimilation takes absolutely nothing—it might in fact be a social imperative. Art exists independently from society, however, it is not hindered by its folly or compounded by its lies; therefore being a faceless cog in its staggering machine is something less than admirable, is instead abject and offal. Music is intended to be an earnest form of expression, a way of conveying the way the world sounds to you—the turning of the gears and the spinning of the spheres, the way you interpret these things. When you interpret the numerous, beguiling and luminous sounds of the world wanly, when you convey their meaning in a manner indistinguishable from everyone else, you barely make the case for being heard in the first place.
—Brandon DiSabatino
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