I can tell from the first 10 seconds that there isn’t nearly enough air horn to justify your glowing review of this band.
L’HOMME RUN - “PIZZA PARTY”
There is an unspoken agreement that gets upheld within most circles of undergraduate art, I’ve found, whereby all involved will offer one another their unflagging and uncritical support in matters of their work. It’s a sticking-together, community-fostering sort of arrangement, but it’s also a support mechanism where one is in many cases genuinely helpful and needed. You lend amps and trade guitars when it’s needed, you bob your head and shuffle around prominently during shows, and then after shows you walk up and say hey and give like good tidings. To do otherwise would be to turn down free fans and free friends, and mammothly jerkish besides.
Truth was of course that most of the kids’ music was awful. Hyper-serious, needy, insistent. Their disaffection was selective and piebald, and their rage insufficiently explained. They were almost never as cool or effortless as their expressionlessness suggested. Even when technique and musicality were in no short supply the atmosphere that misted it was suffocating and tiresome. In fact the system of mutual support existed mostly to disguise their awfulness and their dearth of actual fans, because what better hedge against the brutal facts of your own shittiness than the knowledge, carefully stored, of someone else’s. It’s why at dinner and in social settings the support agreement amounted to a gag rule, whereby nobody dared to actually talk about someone else’s music for fear that it would be construed as critical and inspire a retributive volley of criticism and lead to bad feelings just sort of spreading all around and back to you, the offender, like an ink spill.
But then there were kids like the ones in L’Homme Run, kids who just sort of made music or painted pictures or wrote stories or did art and didn’t seem to be afflicted by any of the same hardships that hamstrung us when we tried to do those things. They seemed filled always with simple cheer and unselfconscious vigor. They could make beats that sound like they fell off the back of a 1981 Tom Tom Club album and really mean it, really enjoy it and make other people enjoy it as much as they did. They actually finished things they started. It’s not as though they’d figured something out that we hadn’t, it didn’t seem; it’d be hard in fact to say that they’d done much very much figuring out of anything at all. And they never got too deeply involved in the tense tacit pact that sustained the rest of us, because like why should they have: as we grimaced and hunched over laptops and guitars, they were out having a better time and getting laid more and attracting bigger audiences and on top of all that just making better music, more natural and more exciting and more fun, and you can see already why this kind of thing can make a lot of people mad, really fucking mad.
