While there's no doubt that
artists should
push into new territory, many listeners may wonder why their favorite indie
rock band seems to be leading them through this particular soundscape, which at times feels like the backing music to the 1971 action movie Shaft.
Humour, sadness, elation, depression; pathos, ebullience, turbulence; love, hate, attraction, revulsion; pointing,
pushing, pulling, cavorting; turning, tossing, tumbling, twisting;
rock and roll, victory and defeat; all the elements, in fact, of intense human interaction and drama that were once the province of figurative art, particularly figurative painting — where they formed the pretext upon which was built a profound diversity of imaginative visual constructs — are seemingly no longer at the behest of figurative art, which languishes in states of mock - academia or faux - avant - gardism, by turns bathetic, mundane or grotesque... all that human content is now, surprisingly but necessarily, the prerogative of the abstract
artist.