Micro Reviews: Reviewed
8 things I learned by listening to my old CD collection
In early September while my parents were out of town and conditions in my apartment necessitated leaping at any opportunity to crash somewhere else I found myself sleeping in the bedroom I grew up in. I couldn’t help but feel a bit wistful. The air had just started to stiffen outside, and faced with an oncoming winter and a long weekend to myself I quickly reverted to my second favorite way to kill time in high school: gaming.
My parents have held onto my old Playstation 2 for its utility as a DVD player, and I never had the heart to get rid of many of my old games. Dynasty Warriors 3 was at the top of my pile, so in it went and out went my brain. If you’re unfamiliar, Dynasty Warriors 3 is an adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, a historical war epic written in 14th century China.
Lest you think this game is anything approaching an educational experience, you play as a historical character of your choice and spend the game mowing down endless waves of nameless soldiers through levels that loosely resemble the plot of the novel which loosely resembles events in Chinese history. Mostly it's an excuse to watch shapes move on a screen while pressing buttons repetitively. Dynasty Warriors 3 is very good at its job of turning your brain off but keeping you sharp. As it so happens, these are the perfect conditions for my first favorite way to kill time in high school: listening to music.
In my old bedroom there is a tower of CDs, all accumulated from middle school to college, roughly the entire 00s. On a whim I decided to listen to all of them in the order that they were arbitrarily arranged on the shelves and write short reactions to them on my Instagram Stories. I thought this would be a breezy low stakes way to keep my writing skills sharp.
Two months and nearly three hundred CDs later, I should have known that my completist tendencies would get the best of me. Not that I’m complaining. It was a blast to work my way through a decade of physical media, much of it good or at least interesting, some of it awful and cringe-worthy. Along the way I had great conversations with people who grew up listening to a lot of the same music, both people my age and Gen X-ers that had these same records on cassette and helped give a first hand account of how certain records went over upon release.
Here is a loose list of things that I learned from the project:
My CD collection is hardly representative of my “true” collection:
Due to circumstances out of my control (being born in the 1990s) my formative listening years took place during a sea change in music consumption. I owned both a CD player and an iPod Mini in high school. The iPod Mini was a total hunk of junk, prone to glitch out for weeks on end, which meant that keeping a well stocked CD collection was a must if I wanted to listen to music on the go. But once the internet got fast enough at home, I probably downloaded twice as much music as I bought. That means that this review project barely scratched the surface of what I was listening to during this stretch of time. You’d expect then that the music I paid for would be the music that I liked the most, but you’d be wrong. Often I would download a band’s best album and only end up buying the less essential records to complete the collection. When I look at the ground that this project covered, I can’t help but also see the shadow of other records' absence.
I have always been a completist, often to my detriment:
A big part of the reason my CD collection is in the triple digits is that once I gained any real interest in a band I wouldn’t stop at buying just one of their records. This would happen whether or not the additional albums were any good, or even significantly different from the ones I already had. It wasn’t just about having more good music, but about knowing for myself what the whole of an artist's catalog sounded like. Sure, I knew in advance that Metallica’s Load was bad, but I had to experience it for myself.
Sometimes this impulse was justified by a genuine love for a band’s work and was rewarded with a rich collection of tunes. I don’t regret for a minute having so many albums by Opeth, Pain of Salvation, or Meshuggah. But then I look at three (!) Ayreon CDs sitting next to four Amon Amarth CDs and seriously question my sanity. Did I really need a second The Project Hate album when I didn’t even like the first one that I bought? Couldn’t that $12 have gone towards literally anything else?
My taste in that decade was laser focused on loud guitar music
Some would argue that it still is, I guess. At least these days I make a pointed effort to listen broadly, not just as an intellectual exercise but because there’s a lot of great music out there that sounds nothing like Converge. But judging by my physical collection I seemed to think there were only two types of music: metal and core.
There are some exceptions, a stray Portishead record, some of the more ambient Nine Inch Nails albums, Bitches Brew by Miles Davis etc. But overall this project was one metal album after another. On the plus side this means that listening to all of these records sequentially sharpened my ear to the finer details of each album. It was now easier than ever to tell which records were actually good, and which ones I listened to out of obligation. Which brings me to my next point.
Forums had a bigger sway over my purchases than peers or media:
To be fair, this is also because my friends were more than willing to burn CDs or send files of the music they liked, so I didn’t need to go out and buy it. But even under those conditions, I went to music forums for all purchasing advice. I use the word “forum” loosely here. Message boards and sites based on user submitted reviews both count. Each of these sites had over time developed an internal canon particular to the taste and interests of its users. Drum forums pushed me towards prog rock. Metalheads with a solid 15 years on me sent me towards overlooked releases from the early 90s. Sputnikmusic’s mix of classic rock fans and British hipsters directed me towards more critically acceptable fair and post-hardcore.
But if we’re being real, it’s the strongly opinionated cretins of metal-archives that had the strongest hold on my wallet. I bought way, way too many records simply because metal nerds that I would never meet determined that there was a select list of bands that were worthy of attention. This canon intersected with popular taste, but arrived filtered through a lens of contrarian resentment towards bands they deemed too populist in style. I had enough good sense to check out modern and mainstream releases panned by the archivers on my own time, but I dutifully picked up extreme records from the 90s on a monthly basis.
The 2000s had a very distinct sound
And that sound was extremely harsh.
It can be hard in the moment to recognize sonic trends. Easy enough to spot the eccentricities of the past, a 70s string section or 80s drum machine. But here in the present, we take for granted that what we’re hearing will one day sound just as dated. We imagine that the instruments we hear now will be used in perpetuity, recorded by mixing technology that has reached the end of history. Which is to say that while I knew that compression was over-applied in the 00s, I never consciously noticed it until the sound had passed out of favor.
There were some artistic benefits to this hyper-compressed sound. In the case of an album like Ashes of the Wake, it reduces Lamb of God into a churning percussion ensemble, a perfect fit for the record’s military setting. More often that not however, it seems to remove the sounds from their instrument and player of origin. Sound at the moment of impact and nothing else. Like shrinking a stage to a catwalk, actors into finger puppets, no depth of field or feeling for that matter. In heavy music this sound has its advantages over the muddy mixes of the 90s, but anything lighter gets smooshed. Like Dredg’s Catch Without Arms for instance. Speaking of which!
Apparently everyone my age had a Dredg phase
Didn’t see this one coming!
Dredg aren’t a band that gets much burn these days and to my knowledge they never got a huge radio push in their heyday, but somehow Catch Without Arms was a staple for all of my instagram followers. Immediately after reviewing the album I was flooded with “holy shit I forgot about this band!” messages. So, very popular in the moment but not in the long run. Weird. Good record, too loud though!
Instagram is dead, and we have killed it.
You may have noticed that Instagram has become increasingly text heavy in the last year. Captions are longer than ever, and the pictures they accompany often feel like an excuse to divert your attention to the underlying text. You’ve probably shared a stylish infographic that framed text in millennial pink, or you’ve muted a friend who nuked your feed with the same. My Micro Review project was part of the same trend, an example of a Text Man using an image based app for Texts.
I do not think this bodes well for Instagram. My theory is that the history of social media is one that bends from text-based to images and final to video/audio. Apps and sites based around the later generally skew younger, whereas older generations flock to text oriented apps. After leaving Facebook behind for the Boomers, my generation has remade Instagram in our increasingly aging image.
On one hand, this works to my favor. My skills are far better suited to typing than actually appearing on screen. But, this ossification into the world of text suggests that Instagram is quickly losing its ability to exist at the cutting edge of the web. Only a matter of time until it becomes a niche site for the olds. The circle of life!
Finally, I am not that bad at writing about music
Sorry if that sounds too self-effacing, and thus too narcissistic, but since 2020 was the first year since roughly 2013 that I didn’t have any music writing published anywhere (this personal substack excluded) it was nice to have a regular writing practice that also had a built in audience. I wouldn’t say that the Micro Reviews were my finest work, too many typos, but they were fun and people seemed to like them. Sometimes it is just that simple. It feels good to share your thoughts and have people respond with their own.
So if you followed along with the Micro Reviews, whether you responded or not, thank you. If you haven’t, they’re still viewable on my Instagram page, and please excuse the typos.