Innovation is not in and of itself a virtue. Too much weight, it would therefore seem, is often placed on a band’s pursuit of new directions within a well-established genre, on their so-called ‘originality’. For this all so commonly amounts to nothing more than nouveau pour le nouveau, a blind fumbling about in desperate search of novelty. The results hardly ever live up to the hype that usually surrounds a release that promises to ‘revolutionise’ or ‘radically redefine’ a genre, and the thoughtless enthusiasm that’s typically showered on such shallow displays of experimentation makes it all the more insufferable.
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