One of the things you pick up on, joining a project where you review 365 albums in 365 days, is that everybody seems to perceive and listen to music in their own way. On a fundamental level, it’s an almost indispensable form of media, among the most universal human experiences; I can’t think of anybody who doesn’t listen to music at all, and almost everyone has tastes or preferences when it comes to genres and artists, often very strong ones. We might not agree on what music is good, necessarily, but almost everybody can agree that music is good.
And yet, despite this, there’s so much variety in how people approach the medium. Growing up, insofar as I had a musical taste of my own, it was expressed almost entirely through playlists, usually those curated by other people. I’m not alone in this—to this day, I know people with excellent and varied musical inclinations who listen almost exclusively to playlists or individual tracks. In the modern era, with so many options available to listeners, it’s entirely reasonable to go your whole life while listening to a single- or double-digit number of albums in full. Before 2023, I was on track to do just that.
Taking part in the Daily Spin was a huge shift in the way I saw music, and it opened some fascinating topics of discussion that aren’t often touched on. In particular, it drew my attention to the way an artist’s or group’s style develops over time, something often alluded to in reviews and critical analysis, yet rarely defined in clear-cut terms. What does it mean for a sound to evolve in a good way, or a bad one? Clearly it’s a lot more complex than just producing albums that are better or worse overall, and I think I started to get at some of the underlying complexities over the course of last year, but I found myself wanting to devote more time to studying this idea of artistic change and improvement in its own right.
That’s where the idea for this series came from. The Class Act is, as its name might suggest, a series studying the discography of various musical acts to gain a better appreciation of how they adjust their sound from one album to the next. There’s no set posting schedule—after last year, I think getting to sit with each of these albums for a while will make a key difference—but there is a clear structure: one season for each artist or group I choose to review, with one episode for each album they’ve produced. Each season will feature a wrap-up post to offer some concluding thoughts on the discography, how it changes over time, and what the highs and lows of its artistic evolution can tell us. Lastly, the seasons will alternate between musical acts I’m already more than familiar with—cases where, for a significant number of their albums, I’ll be revisiting music I’ve already heard and rated in the past—and ones that are largely new to me, beyond the occasional listen that convinced me I needed more.
That’s more than enough preamble, so let’s get into the meat of this thing. We’re starting on the familiar side of the spectrum, going to my favorite band of all time and the one that, to me, defines stylistic shift more than any other: Radiohead. That means nine albums and nine episodes in the first season of this new undertaking, starting with Pablo Honey.
See you soon.