As you’ll have seen by now, the newbie is generally some generic schmuck who’s out of luck but still yearns to make a buck, which is why this BBC review is so weird: the newbie in this case is The Meters, who could easily fall on the other side of the equal sign for one of these. “…complete with aggressive tom-tom work and ominous horns, feels like it could have been a “Before These Crowded Streets” B-Side, its…” “…brings to mind early Southern-Gothic era REM and Anna Lee sound like it’s a lost B-side from The Band.”īut when the genius classic b-side is early Dave Matthews, what is being conferred, really? Now the roughest way this trope is occurring is when the theoretical b is from a classic band, thus conferring credibility on the new’un: I also don’t get why it could only “almost” pass? It really seems like some of these guys just cut and paste sentences from other places or something. The second, from SMH (Sydney Morning Herald), makes the significance of the b-side’s being lost even significant-er by saying it’s long-lost, like a cousin. The first of these, from NME, clearly “gets” what a b-side is supposed to do. “Meanwhile, diehard Oasis fans may be most delighted with White Sunshine, which could almost pass as a long-lost B-side.” “It would’ve made for a better-than-decent B-side back in the day – which, given his one-time mastery of that lost art, is high praise indeed.” Which by the way can it be arranged that we will never have to see either Gallagher’s face again? Didn’t the Declaration of Independence mean anything? Didn’t Blur mean anything? Here are two more, both about Noel Gallagher’s new solo album. But neither of those should matter in this case since, again, the reviewer is probably meaning to say the song would not have been out of place on the albums themselves. I’m including this to ask why the b-side has to be ‘lost’? ‘Lost’ seems to ramp up the fetishism for b-sides by merging it with crate digger fetishism. “Fans familiar with his early albums such as ‘Underdogs’ and ‘Beautiful Midnight’ could easily mistake “Hey Hell Heaven” as a lost b-side to those two albums.” Here’s another one that does the same thing:
Does he mean it would’ve had to be a b, since there was no more room on Blue Album? If we go by strict syntactic logic, he is saying that Blue Album isn’t power-pop, but just its b-sides. “…a power-pop tune that showcases Weezer at its best and sounds a tad like a Blue Album B-side.”įirst off, can we all agree never ever to EVER please never use the word “tad” for any reason ever whatsoever? Okay, now that we’re all on the same page, can someone please tell me what this reviewer means by a Blue Album b-side? I would sort of understand it if he said it could have been on the power-pop album Blue Album, but he seems to have just overreached and thrown the trope at us for good measure. This next one compares the band to itself, this time favorably: This is actually even lamer than when a band is being compared to another band, because it misunderstands that b-sides signify something special to people who buy singles, a quiet gem or alternate energy from a band, as opposed to a song that is just not good enough to make the album. If anything, it sounds like a lost B-side from Channel Orange, lacking the cohesion and maturity of the…” “…offers little that we haven’t heard before. In these cases, the band is compared to itself, as with a recent Frank Orange number:
The trope is often deployed to establish that the song in question is a sub-par addition to an artist’s catalog. Every part of this shortcut writing is frustrating, moreso now that we’ve collected enough examples of it to clearly establish it as a trend. There’s an especially pernicious version of this floating around these days in which the reviewer says a song by some band sounds like it could have been a long-lost b-side by some other band.
This citational reflex is de rigueur in the prison house of rock, where everything has a meaning only in relation to something already recorded. Rock Critic Laziness Dept.: We are officially over the tendency in record reviews to, instead of actually talking about music, explain what a song sounds like by likening it to another band’s sound.
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