The Big Pink – A Brief History of Love (2009)

My first indie awakening happened at the turn of the millennium, when I was introduced to bands such as Grandaddy, Radiohead, Elliott Smith and Super Furry Animals. The other awakening came around the year 2010 when I started using Spotify and the possibilities to listen to new bands exploded. It was around that time that I first heard about The Big Pink in my friend's music blog. He had seen them at the Flow Festival in Helsinki and his writings led me to listen to this band. Quite quickly I also bought the album on a CD. The album cover is quite amazing in its dark and classy look. The Big Pink must be a reference to The Band's album Music from Big Pink. The sound of this band is in no way connected to that album though. This album is filled with noise and hypnotising rhythms and the sounds seem to take even greater part in the music than melodies.



I do not normally like music that's so unmelodic, but in this case, the sounds are truly cool. Also, some of the choruses actually do have catchy melodies and when you go into those choruses from noisy distortion, it sounds quite amazing. The band also uses quite a lot of electronic instruments and sounds, but the main stage is reserved for huge overdriven guitar walls. In that way, I would compare this band to the shoegaze bands of the late 80's and early 90's. But unlike with those bands, instead of delicate and melodic hymns behind the wall of distortion, The Big Pink has pounding rhythms and loud singing.

This album had probably the most well-known song by this band that's been released even by this date. Dominos is a great hit song with catchy chorus that's easy to belt along to. It got some radio presence back in the day and I also saw the well-produced music video on TV more than once. This was also mainly the song that made me buy this album. There were some other songs worth mentioning on this album as well. Electronic sounding Velvet may sound even more like a typical hit song. It has that hypnotising and groovy rhythm that's quite similar to some of the 1970's Krautrock and art rock songs. I'm a bit reminded of David Bowie's Germany era. There's also a clear melody in that song.

After I had enjoyed this album quite a bit I borrowed the band's second album from the library and I was bitterly disappointed. All the cool sounds of this album were gone and replaced by clean and studio-heavy sounds that changed this cool noise band into yet another boring indie rock band without their original sound. I feel like this has happened to quite a few bands lately. Back in the day the first albums were often still a bit immature and the second albums showed the true potential of a band, but more recently I find more and more that the first album actually stays as the best work for many bands. I don't know if it's because usually there has been more time in preparing the music for the first album, or because bands are seduced by better record deals and start over-producing their albums, but it just seems to happen quite often.

There are of course exceptions as well. This has, however, led to an interesting behaviour in record collecting from my part. I always used to buy every single album from a band I liked, but more recently I've found myself just buying that one best album by any new band and the other albums just don't have the same effect anymore. This is specifically annoying when it comes to gigs, because I've often loved the first album, but I'm too late to catch any shows during that album's tour and when I actually get a chance to see the band live, it's too late and their music has changed to something I'm not too keen on.

I don't think The Big Pink will stay in music history as a significant band, but I'm happy that I have this album, because it's a great piece of work and a truly ambitious debut album.

Listen to the album on Spotify.