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Diamond Nights music review
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Diamond Nights Popsicle
Kenado
So, what exactly is the role of the music critic, anyway?
The simple answer is that they are supposed to tell the reader whether the album is any good or not. But things aren’t that simple. No one can completely agree on what makes an album “good”. Taste is subjective. We are all painfully aware that one person’s Flaming Lips is another’s Celine Dion – and vice versa. Is the critic supposed to pretend they are above all of that? That they alone are authorized to lay out the objective criteria by which all music can be judged? It reeks of elitism. How can you honestly suggest that something someone else likes is crap just because it doesn’t fit your tastes?
Track listing:
01 Destination Diamonds
02 Saturday Fantastic
03 Drip Drip
04 It’s A Shokka
05 Red Hex
06 The Girl’s Attractive
07 Beyond The City of Love
08 Snakey Ruth
09 Dirty Thief
10 Needle In The Rice
11 A Kiss To Tell
12 Ordinary Life
On the other hand, there are those who think the critic should focus solely on providing helpful advice to their readers. The music critic should capture the musical essence of the record in words: to translate it from the disc to the page. This is the criticism of the clever adjective and of the “you’ll love/hate this band because they sound like this band and this band”. The reader can then decide for themselves whether or not it fits their particular tastes.
The problem with this way of thinking is that it reduces the review to nothing more than a Buyer’s Guide of Music. Is an album’s worth left to be determined by sales alone? It would nothing more than pure populism. Shouldn’t we be able to say, without fear of offending democratic ideals, that the White Stripes are better than, say, Hillary Duff (who outsells them nearly ten to one)? Isn’t that just a fundamental truth of the universe?
With all of this uncertainty, it’s nearly impossible to decide what to do with an album like Diamond Nights’ Popsicle. It’s not like they don’t know how to play their instruments. They are perfectly competent. The songs aren’t a complete mess. They have choruses and hooks and solos in all the right places. There is nothing particularly wrong with Popsicle. Except that it sucks.
According to me.
My entirely subjective objective criteria don’t happen to include your standard Thin Lizzy-esque stadium rock power chords with occasional “blistering” solo and the whining-moaning-sometimes-falsetto vocals of someone who is actually in the middle of having an orgasm right now but thought they’d take this opportunity to sing you this song. And that’s pretty much what you get with Diamond Nights.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re the kind of person who spells the word “rock” with an A and a W, then this could be a hidden gem. I certainly couldn’t tell you what makes them much different from Thin Lizzy or Judas Priest. And I know there are plenty of people who think that those bands rule, the White Stripes are weird, the Flaming Lips are pretentious and the Strokes are gay. I even went to high school with some of them.
So maybe Diamond Nights do rawk. Maybe Popsicle is one of the best albums of the year. The best even. In fact, Diamond Nights might be the greatest band of the last ten years. Yeah, sure, now that I think about it, they could easily be better than the Strokes. Or the Flaming Lips. Or the Beatles. Diamond Nights might change your life. Hell, they might change everything. Diamond Nights may be The Single Greatest Band In The History Of The Entire World.
