The best music is always the hardest to pin down. I should know, I have to capture such elusivity in words on a daily basis. But that is as it should be. Why give the listener more of the same when you can give them something cool, clever, creative, and confounding? Not that genres are that important, in fact, they more often than not get in the way.
Reduction In Force has always been a band that it feels pointless to try to tag or pinpoint. Beyond a general tip of the hat to a post-punk golden age, and made, in some part, as a response to the over-reliance of machine-made music of the here-and-now, rather than the human factor, the music very much goes where it wishes. It’s more about the fresh than the familiar.
Take “Reconcile,” the new one; it covers eras from a ’50s surf-guitar twang to an ’80s post-punk outsider, formative indie vibe, to the naughties six-string revivalists and on to the cutting edge of today’s post-genre, boundary-hopping mindset.
Wherever you try to place this on the musical map, it both sorta fits and yet is wide of the mark; similarly, those trying to pin it on a chronological musical line will find it impossible, or at least ever shifting. Some scientists say that time is not the forward flow we think it is, and that we need to think more in terms of waves, circles, spirals, intersections, and shared eras. Well, I don’t know about science, but when it comes to music, this is clearly the case. How do I know? Because I have just listened to “Reconcile,” and it is not a song you can pin down or pigeonhole in such a logical, linear fashion.
