Wasted (?) Rewards

I really kind of like my credit card this year. Not because my interest rate is super exceptional or anything, but because of my rewards program. As I accumulate points, or whatever virtual currency has been assigned to me in this system, I'm able to trade them in for so, so many different rewards, and they really do have a little shopping mall worth of options for me. But predictably enough I always fall back to a standard choice: the iTunes gift card.

What could make more sense for me? Music is awesome. Free is awesome. Free music? Super awesome. I get free music and suddenly I turn into Andy from "Parks and Recreation" with my excitement. My latest iTunes card showed up in the mail today. I scratched away the little silver bar on the back to reveal my code and put that baby to use right away, downloading the new album from Evanescence, which was just released earlier this week.

You remember Evanescence, don't you? Sure you do. A band led by a female singer with a very strong, melodic voice singing over some depressingly goth/vaguely self-pitying songs built around some minor-key piano lines and crunchy guitar chords. They had a monster album with a couple of big radio hits back around the turn of the century, give or take a couple of years. "Bring Me to Life?" "My Immortal?" Yeah, well, you'd know them if you heard them. The second album came out a couple of years later, well after typical narcissistic infighting decimated the band, leaving only the singer to rebuild it all by pretty much replacing all of the other musicians. Unfortunately, from my perspective at least, one of the best things about the band was the musical composition that went into the songs, and after the big ugly break-up scene sent some of the more pivotal songwriters packing, that was more or less lost. That second album was an okay rock album; it stayed in my rotation for awhile but didn't prove all that memorable in the end. And after that, the band fell off the map for several years.

Until recently, like in earlier this week recently when this new self-titled album came out. I'm listening to it as I write this. And you know what? A lot like that second album. It's a serviceable rock album with some decent little hooks to it, but overall its showing itself to be just as forgettably generic as I expected it to be. Which begs the obvious question -- why did I even buy it if I had such low expectations?

Because there was a chance it would be good.

I've learned over the years that I'm something of an explorer when it comes to music. I read a lot about it, I follow the careers of different musicians, and this way I find myself led into discovering albums I don't or artists I'm not familiar with that could have some kind of connection, however tenuous, to an artist I already know and like. iTunes is really good at exploiting this weakness, so it turns out I will download a lot of music purely on spec -- maybe because of the user reviews, or the editorial write up, or some professional reviews, or the listing of similar artists, or maybe even just the name of the band is kind of cool and I'll decide they must have something going on if they were bold enough to name themselves something like Spock's Beard or The Airborne Toxic Event or Fair to Midland or even The Poodles. (The Poodles are a pretty awesome band playing an updated European knockoff version of 80s metal, by the way. Try and imagine the convoluted thread that led me to that discovery.)

So, to reflect upon this odd proclivity of mine, I'm going to give you a list of artists I've discovered simply because I took a chance, even if I knew next to nothing about them before I gave their music a first try, and I wound up with at least one more album that I really enjoyed. I'm deciding to limit myself to 20, just as a nice round arbitrary number. Here they are, kind of alphabetically I guess:

*The Airborne Toxic Event: Found from an iTunes link. Saw them described as "literate." I was hooked. Three great albums later they are one of my big discoveries of 2011.
*The Answer: A British hard rock band, very old-school and bluesy. iTunes. I can't imagine why they were never played in the U.S.
*Black Country Communion: Heard of on VH1 Classic's, "That Metal Show." A hard rock supergroup from just a couple of years ago, including one ex-member of Dream Theater playing rock so deeply intrenched in the 70s you can almost smell the incense. Two great albums released in about 14 months.
*The Dead Weather: I saw them perform on Letterman or Conan a month before their first album came out. The performance was electric. I didn't realize until it came out that Jack White was in the band.
*Glen Burtnik: Heard a single on the radio back in the 80s. Bought the 45 (I KNOW!) and put it on many of my 80s mix tapes. Found a good back catalog years later.
*Grace Potter and the Nocturnals: Just learned about them this summer when Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters mentioned on Facebook his band was about to play a show with them. I figured, if they can keep up with BHTM, they must have something. They do.
*Hum: I heard one song on a radio show and found the album. You know the song -- you'd recognize the hook from countless television commercials. Not a great album overall, but the songs that got to me really, really got to me.
*Kamelot: Found them on Pandora on my Dream Theater station. A little too theatrical, but not necessarily in a bad way.
*Marah: I heard a song on the radio and picked up that Bruce Springsteen was doing a backing vocal. That made it worth checking out.
*Matthew Good: iTunes reviews said he was HUGE in Canada. Some sort of ambient but very good songs.
*Nine Days: A one hit wonder for most people; "Story of a Girl" from the 90s. But I have five or six albums, and they have two or three of my favorite songs.
*The Poodles: Already covered. Awesome and ridiculous at the same time.
*Porcupine Tree: A band that was traveling in the same circles as some of my other favorite bands, so it was inevitable that I checked them out. They are now one of my favorites on their own.
*Ryan Bingham: Heard him on Letterman. Got out of bed and downloaded the album.
*Savatage: When I was wondering where the hell the Trans-Siberian Orchestra had come from, I learned that whole project stemmed from this band. If you think you would like that bombastic, operatic hard rock outside of Christmas songs or forced theme albums, here you go.
*Spock's Beard: I heard they were touring with Dream Theater. A large percentage of all of my favorite music can be traced back here.
*Taking Back Sunday: I liked the band name and saw they'd been around awhile. I figured if they had staying power there must be a reason. Gave it a shot. Good summer driving album.
*The Twilight Singers: Letterman. Immediate download. No regrets.
*30 Seconds to Mars: I was too curious about a Hollywood prettyboy like Jared Leto posing in a ridiculous pink mohawk and trying to say he was a serious musician to not see what it was like. And I'll give the dude his credit -- Fight Club is not the only cool thing he's ever been involved with.

So sometimes it can really pay off to step outside of the comfort zone and see what else is out there, music wise. However, I have to say with full disclosure that my music library has at least twice as many of these exploration artists or albums that turned out to be mostly awful. But I try not to think about those so much....