A couple of weeks ago I received a pre-release copy of the eponymously-titled debut album by new band Dead Heart Bloom. I’ve had it on heavy-rotation ever since, and a mighty fine album it is, too. Dead Heart Bloom is the latest musical vehicle for the implausibly-talented Boris Skalsky. This is the same Skalsky who was one of the leading lights in Phaser, the DC-based band who released one great album (Sway) before unfortunately imploding under the combined weights of commercial and artistic pressures.
Phaser are usually categorized as ‘post-shoegazing’ (you tell me…) whereas Dead Heart Bloom are effectively uncategorizable, with the music shifting effortlessly between styles from one song to the next. Sway and Dead Heart Bloom are two quite different albums, and if you didn’t know that Skalsky connected the two, you probably wouldn’t stumble across one given the other. But I do know the connection, so just for the fun of it, and because it is very easy to do on an iPod, I played Sway and Dead Heart Bloom together, with all the songs shuffled.
Interestingly, the albums gelled together quite nicely – even given Dead Heart Bloom’s frequent stylistic switchbacks, and despite hearing the tracks on Dead Heart Bloom out of their original conceptual order. There are shared musical devices, common lyrical threads, and it is not that difficult to see both albums as the product of (at least in part) the same mind. But beyond connecting the aural dots between the two, I found I was also listening to – and enjoying – the individual songs on both albums in a whole new light. It’s as though the songs on one album were giving a new perspective to songs on the other by framing them in a different – but familiar – context.
This got me thinking about Frank Zappa’s ‘Big Note’ theory. Zappa maintained that his entire body of work was part of a single composition – which formed a single, big note – and his music was only fully appreciable within that context. I disputed this at the time, and still remain unconvinced of it (although I’ve never dismissed it as simply pseudointellectual pontificating – Zappa was a very clever man) . But following my DHB/Phaser epiphany, I have to admit that he may well have been onto something.
Clearly, some music is best appreciated (or better appreciated) within the context of other music. Furthermore, some music by an artist can only be properly understood in relation to other music by the same artist. Being an enormously-varied artist, Zappa probably understood this better than most. For example, Harder Than Your Husband, when heard in isolation is an (admittedly slightly strange) Country and Western song – bemusing at best. But considered within the wider context of Zappa’s entire oeuvre, it is imparted with new-found meaning, becoming arch satire on rednecks and the entire C&W genre, with schoolboy double-entendres thrown in for good measure. Similarly, Valerie on its own is pure ’50s doo-wop (despite being recorded two decades later), but listened to in relation to Zappa’s other work it is immediately identifiable as a pastiche, mocking the trials and tribulations of teenage dating. And so it goes, through much of Zappa’s work – individual songs only really come into their own in relation to all the others (this may explain why Zappaphiles are such completists…).
Whether this proves the Big Note theory or not is of course highly debatable (I’ll need to put all of Zappa’s albums on shuffle to fully put this to the test!), and I’m not sure Boris Skalsky has ever heard of, let alone subscribes to, the Big Note theory. But if there is anything to take away from this, it is that the wider and deeper you listen – within an artist, a genre, or just in general – the better you can appreciate and enjoy what you do hear…
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