GOOD SWILL HUNTING
Boston post-hardcore supergroup Fiddlehead share their new album with the toughest critics of all: townie bar rats.
Nothing incapacitates my neurological system, as both a writer and a musician, quite like reviewing music. Who am I to be the gold-standard arbiter of what is good and what is not? I say this with sympathy, having consumed that cocktail of fear and anxiety that many artists are forced to swallow after pouring themselves out onto a record, only to be crudely spit out by some blowhard asshole who can’t even play a fucking power chord.
Even worse is the historic and factual realization that the all-time greats sometimes get it wrong. There’s Lester Bangs savaging Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut, and Lenny Kaye, a fantastic writer and musician, totally missing the mark in his review of the Rolling Stones cocaine opus Exile on Main Street.
And so, when CREEM reached out to me to review Fiddlehead’s third record, Death Is Nothing to Us (released Aug. 18 on Run for Cover Records), I reluctantly agreed. Then fear gripped me like a sickness. As I walked around my Boston neighborhood listening to the album, a paella of adjectives and influences cooked inside my brain.