Artists like BLOCK don’t come along that often. When they do, they act as a sort of benchmark, a backdrop that can bring into sharp focus the fact that most music in the modern age is unadventurous, happy to follow the pack, do more of the same, be, well, whatever the opposite of unique is. It’s not about being revolutionary; it’s about artists setting more challenging goals, not just for themselves but for the betterment of music as a whole.
It is not so much that BLOCK is genreless or even genre hopping, although he is fairly hard to pin down; it is more that whatever sound or style you find him working with, he is always exploring the liminal spaces, the fringes where that genre becomes something else, not necessarily weird or deliberately strange but his approach to making music in such less obvious places is that the result is often unexpected and artistically bold.
Take opener “I Thought I’d Won The War”: an alt-indie-rock groover for sure, but it is the way everything melts in the middle, ending up somewhere between the psychedelic and the sonically psychotic, and then snaps back into line that makes it so brilliant.
“California Calls” is hazy and heavenly, “All in My Head” mixes gritty groove and ambient grace. Foot on the monitor rock meets chamomile tea? (I’m not even sure what that means, but it seems to convey something of the brilliance of the song.)
“No One Ever Taught Me How” blends BLOCK’s NYC no-wave, anti-folk, underground, outsider past with a more British post-punk-pop/new-wave vibe; it also explains why he was recently sharing stages with Michelson, another artist who has turned well-honed quirk into a selling point.
There is a rarefied pantheon of artists who are held on a pedestal for their ability to be radically different, odd (in the very best and most praiseworthy of ways), and yet oddly accessible…BLOCK certainly sits amongst them.
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