@Kate Richardson: I like your explanation of the ‘band-specific’ theory, and I can see what you’re getting at here more clearly now, much thanks! (At the same time there’s almost an unspoken question — does what a band/musician does mean that there is always going to be a more appropriate or logical way of recording or presenting it than another way?)

As for the po-mo campfire, that would take a long time to unpack fully and I need to dash for now, but I think invocations of images like that tie in to the eternal (and ultimately bedevilling) question of going ‘back to the roots’ in some fashion, something which I think the use of the phrase ‘exists outside of chronology’ calls to the fore, implying that something is literally timeless and constant. Perhaps a way to think about it is this — is it a question of simplicity being more true/honest/real (or another adjective of your choice) or is it a question of simplicity as intentionally minimalist strategy? By drawing your comparison to “The Next Messiah,” I’m reminded of a striking contrast in reverse from another album this year — the vaudeville vocal/ukelele strum of “Deep Water” leading into the brutalist heavy tech of “Machine Gun” on the Portishead album.

More thoughts later, gotta dash.

I think you’ve raised a good question here that I sort of can’t defend myself on, really. I guess it might come down to a matter of personal taste–what you experience as “true”-feeling, and obviously there’s no absolute definition of what truth sounds like in music (or of truth itself?), so for me to imply that the song’s simplicity makes it truer is just flat-out baseless.

Howeeeveerrr, I think we all have a need to find some sort of truth (that is to say, resemblance to our own emotions and experiences) in art so that we can feel connected to it. I guess, to fall back on my apparently beloved cliches, this would be the definition of something striking a chord. The lyrics of this song struck a chord with me, and the minimalist form of the song highlights the lyrics, so with that sort of roundabout logic (if you could even call it that), then yes, the simplicity of the song made it “truer” for me.

But you know I also find Sigur Ros’s music to be very “true,” and I don’t think anyone would ever accuse them of simplicity. So again, it’s not some sort of theory that I would ever apply broadly to music in general.

Really the song doesn’t exist outside of chronology because…does anything, really? I mean you could say it sounds like a song from X year, or it was recorded using methods from X era, etc., and in that way it is very much attached to a timeline. But at the same time if you were going to construct a chronology of pop music built around generalizations like “’80s pop-lots of synthesizers” (which I don’t advocate because obviously there’s just too much music in the world to make such a claim, but just for the sake of argument), “2000-2010 glossy autotune pop produced with Pro Tools” you wouldn’t be able to include Acid Tongue in that group.

So I guess really a more precise term for it would be anachronistic, although that sort of implies that it belongs to a specific time period, which I don’t think it does. I think the success of the song is that it feels (to me, at least) detached from any era. It feels elemental or something (hence my use of the “stripped to its core” cliche). And I’m sure it would have felt that way if it were recorded digitally, but I think the whole vibe that they were going for on this album was tangibility, songs with a certain element of weight or force behind them, and the process of recording onto a physical tape instead of into a computer I think is at least symbolically significant. Which, hey, may well be useless as shit. But oh well, I got a kick out of it.

Plus if you can slow down Matt Kerney’s “Nothing Left to Lose” in your head, the two songs can blend together pretty nicely.

(What can I say, I liked said film a lot. More cohesive thoughts in a bit.)

Two Weekly contributors going toe to toe, in a friendly way. I like.