Taking Sides: Hatful of Hollow vs Louder than Bombs

Love 'em both though. But Louder than Bombs has 'Half a Person' which is about as perfect as music gets.

The songs on 'Hatful..' all come from the same period, and mostly have the same production, thrillingly basic and brutal. It feels like a document of the first months of the Smiths, an outrageous demonstration of pure talent. It says, "We started this band last year. Since then, we've knocked out a couple of dozen classic songs. Here are our b-sides!" It feels like a proper album.

(I hope nobody has already said this)

I dunno. The lyrics are so repetitive...

Mozz's downfall as a lyricist is that he abuses his punchlines -- instead of writing a plaintive song with one really ace punchline at the end, or writing something with MANY MANY good jokes, he just recycles the same jokes throught the song and assumes they'll be as funny/potent each time.

Hatful is my fave Smiths record -- it just sounds wonderful, a bit wirier and more postpunk-perturbed than the others.

Mainly because it contains "Stretch Out and Wait," a minor contribution in the band's catalogue to most, it's actually my favorite Smiths' song. And I don't even know why exactly...

Whyzzat?

I dunno, I suppose your argument just rubbed me the wrong way because it implied that indie "their early, rawer stuff was better" attitude. It's an attitude that's hugely true for a ton of bands, but getting it too stuck in your head means you're simultaneously denying good bands the opportunity to actually become themselves, which is what the Smiths did. That early stuff was tight and taut and powerful, but in a way which you started by saying was comparable to a lot of other bands: the rest of their career did all sorts of things, all of it uniquely and surprisingly, and in ways very few other bands did -- in ways I don't think the Smiths themselves had completely figured out until they tried them. The "early raw is better" approach gets in the way with a band like this, where they actually successfully matured and became not just "a good band" but a good band of the sort only they could be.

Well, hey, I'm just stating a preference. I think those recordings, as I said, sound "wonderful." And that's not to detract from the glory of later Smiths work (Strangeways is my second-favorite); it's an admission that there's something in Hatful's production (or lack thereof) that really appeals to me. I don't think that the early Smiths were any less unique than the later Smiths just because they borrowed a few things from a popular strain of music -- their sound was still very recognizable as their own.

The "early raw is better" approach gets in the way with a band like this, where they actually successfully matured and became not just "a good band" but a good band of the sort only they could be.

"Maturity" is subjective. And its merits are also debatable.

Err Jody this is sort of my point, but I'm content to just disagree on this one.

Is it? You seem to be saying that the Smiths' later work was better because it was more mature. And I want to know what's so immature about the early work, and why they were any less "themselves" (your word).

My point with regard to maturity was precisely the debatability of its merits: that with a not-insignificant number of rock bands, there really is reason to prize the "early, raw" material, where there's energy, focus, and drive. I was just pointing out that -- in some cases, not necessarily yours -- that line of thinking can blind us to the cases where a band can offer something more valuable and unique once they've cast off the need for drive and energy and opened up into being not a band that's focusing on being fiery or right, but a band that's done that and are now focusing on finding what they themselves can offer that no one else can approach.

I dunno; to put this as pleasantly as possible, this still sounds like a load of bull to me. Maybe if we can bring this down to a less abstract level. "Centrally and quintessentially Smithsy" -- what is this? How exactly is the music that much more focused that it earns the highfalutin title of "entity" (which actually makes me think of a marketable brand rather than a mutable, volatile musical force) instead of just being some silly little "band" with unformed ideas?

On a more musical level, "Louder" is better simply for being more of an overview of the entire Smiths career - there's early primal stuff which appears on "Hatful" (but oh, the version of "Back to the old house" on "HoH" is SO much better) and there's later stuff like the early '87 singles and great little things like "Unloveable" and "Oscillate wildly" and can't you tell I never bought "The world won't listen"? I think a lot of it comes down to being in the UK or not and whether you bought "The world..." first, in which case you probably thought it was a rip off and never bought it.

As for "centrally and quintessentially Smithsy" -- The Queen is Dead is the Smiths album I've listened to least since the age of 16, but I still very much recognize the reason it's held up as their crowning achievement. More so than anything else they did, it's a record that only they could have made, a record that chops out everything but what was most unique and idiosyncratic about the Smiths. All I'm saying on this thread is that so few bands can effectively accomplish that feat that I feel like sticking up for the Smiths comp that reflects that process, even if I listen to the other one more.

However, LTB has a picture of Sheelagh Delaney on the front, and she is a bit of a hottie. so it's not all bad.