The Stone Roses

Sitting at home trying desperately to meet deadlines while fighting off the desire for blessed sleep. As sonic caffeine, I’m blasting songs from The Stone Roses’ self-titled first album.

There was a time at the tail end of the ‘80s that it was my absolute favorite album—I still have a vague memory of the place where I bought it, some now-nonexistent record store on the second floor of Virra Mall before Virra Mall was revamped into the soulless monstrosity that it is now. I got it in cassette format, of course (I would get a CD copy almost 10 years later, in Hong Kong, long after I had played the cassette to death). Utterly smitten by The Stone Roses, I got their odds-and-ends compilation Turns Into Stone afterwards, at the Musicland in the basement of Ali Mall, another music store that no longer exists.

But this is not a lament for the lost cassette-shillers of my youth. It’s a small celebration of sorts of one of the reasons I found myself in those stores in the first place. I remember why I had sought the cassette out: not because it was being played on the radio, not because a video was on MTV (hell, we didn’t have MTV here then), but because I had read an eloquent, gushy review in the UK music weekly magazine Melody Maker. I remember the reviewer used the adjective “godlike,” and recommended that you quit your job and spend the next week just listening to the record over and over. What higher praise could there be? (I had come to trust the Maker by then, after some years of reading issues in the British Council in New Manila—later on, the publication would point me towards the Cardigans, Foo Fighters, Garbage, and other worthwhile acts well before I had heard them, or heard about them, anywhere else.)

That’s one of the great things about working at a music publication, or in this case, writing a music column: the notion that you can steer someone towards music that will maybe, just maybe, more or less change his or her life.

It does bother me sometimes, though, that music reviewers’ ratings can be misleading: reading Rolling Stone while growing up, I used to assume that any record that got less than four stars was not worthy of my attention, much less my paltry pocket money. But, in one issue, there was something about the way a three-star review of The Blue Nile’s Hats was written—a line about warmth.

Hold on, RS has an online reviews archive, I can get the exact quote now: “The band uses instruments masterfully to convey feelings: Synthesizers breathe warmth, a wan trumpet paints late-night downtown scenes, understated percussion registers like the beat of a heart.”

Very, very nice. More than the comparisons to Bryan Ferry and Peter Gabriel, that gave me an idea of what to expect from the album. That line alone was enough to get me to pick up Hats, when I found it a couple of years later at CD Warehouse—a purchase I have never regretted. The Blue Nile remains one of my favorite bands, and Hats, I believe, is The Blue Nile at their best.

I understand that people—myself included—like numerical values attached to their reviews. I guess we should just look at them as a rough, far from exact guide: while one can assume that a rating of 5/5 means the reviewer absolutely believes it’s worthwhile, and a rating of 1 means he or she sincerely believes it’s worthless crap, there’s lots of room in between, lots of shades of gray, lots of “this is not my bag, but you may love it” and “I want to marry this album and have its babies, but it may be ugly in your eyes.”

My mp3 player’s still blasting away. “I Am the Resurrection” now. What a glorious song. Singing softly along in front of my laptop. Despite the deadlines, feeling a little bit free.

Send comments and questions to Luis at thekingofnothingtodo@yahoo.com.