AMAROK

I can vividly remember the first time I listened to Amarok. I don't think I've ever been so irritated and disappointed by a record, before or since. I enjoyed the finale, but all of the disjointed themes and intentionally aggravating sounds (speaker-shattering orchestral hits, Margaret Thatcher, random carpentry, etc) littered throughout the otherwise perfect melodies left me feeling like I'd run a marathon uphill during an ice storm, with the neighborhood kids laughing and pelting me with ice balls the entire time. Every brilliant melody was immediately discarded and replaced by unrelated melodies at a frantic rate. It was incomprehensible gibberish. What themes there were came and went with psychotic abandon, handicapped by confusion. I threw the album in a drawer in disgust and forgot about it for about two years.

Eventually I got around to listening to it again (feeling like I hadn't gotten my money's worth), and found myself thinking that it wasn't nearly as bad as I remembered. I'd put it on again every couple of months when I needed something vastly different from all of that 'regular' (sane) music.

Over time I came to realize that the problems are not in the music. This composition is as perfectly flawless as music can ever be, the very embodiment of an idea. Mike knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote this album and he did a smashing job. All of the changing melodies and aggravating bits are in there specifically for the purpose of boxing your ears any time you might get comfortable. Right at the moment when you'd be getting chills on one of Mike's other albums, this one will blast you or aggravate you or just plain run off in an unrelated direction in an intentional attempt to ruin your listening experience.

Ordinarily Mike takes a lot of care crafting music that flows to an apotheosis of some kind - I tend to think of it rather like a master craftsman creating an intricate and gorgeous stained glass window. Had Mike done that here it would have still been one of his best works. Instead, he takes a gleefully sadistic tact and smashes this creation with a sledgehammer every time it begins to come together. The end result is that you've got to piece it together for yourself after repeated listening. For some, it may come together right away, for others, never.

This creates an incredibly frustrating musical experience for people expecting music that follows the normal rules, in any genre or format. I've only just recently been finding new artists that are learning and doing what Mike did here two decades ago - Kayo Dot and Mars Volta being two examples of similarly challenging artists that I also rather enjoy. The bits in Amarok that once pissed me off are now the highlights of the record. I wouldn't have thought it possible to go from hating a record to loving it, but here I am.

This record taught me how to listen to music in a new, and I think, better way. After this I've had no trouble at getting into genres and styles of music that I once found bland or distasteful. No other record, or artist, has done anything like that for me before, so I find I have to give this album the highest possible marks.

I wouldn't call it my favorite - that's not the point of the album. For me it's been more of a doorway into experiencing other kinds of music. It also gives me my own gleefully sadistic thrill to inflict this album upon unwary listeners for the first time. It's wickedly satisfying to see their faces while bopping along to the first movement - right when the orchestra hits kick in. It also stands out for uniqueness. I've never heard anything remotely like this album in the thousands of records I've listened to.

One friend of mine who has also come to enjoy this record described it as "the most user-unfriendly listening experience I've ever had." I think that's an apt summation. I've come to learn that the finest musical compositions rarely sound good on the first listen. The masterpiece reveals itself when the listener is ready. Thank you, Amarok, for teaching me that lesson.

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