If you were to eat a piece of cake and the first slice tasted delicious you’d probably be tempted to have another. But would that second slice be more enjoyable, less enjoyable or about the same? And if you enjoyed it just as much, would you eat another slice and then keep going, slice after slice until you had eaten the whole cake?
It’s a bit like that with the new Pale Waves song Television Romance for me. I really liked their previous tune There’s A Honey; it was an extremely hooky piece of indie pop. But.....Television Romance sounds an awful lot like that, particularly the chorus where you can virtually sing the chorus of There's A Honey over the top of the song and it doesn't sound wrong. So in theory I should like this just as much. But it's a dilemma. Because is that second slice really as good as the first? If I'd eaten the second slice without tasting the first it would have definitely been superb.
What I'm trying to say (badly) is that our tastes and perceptions of music are affected by what has gone before. It's not quite as simple as just listening to every song in isolation.
Let's continue this idea forward. What if the band released a whole album of songs that sounded very similar? Would I like that? Probably not. For me it's why a band like Oasis became ever less exciting with every album and why David Bowie always kept my attention.
If music is the food of love, give me excess of it, but make sure that it continues to interest me, challenge me and take me to new and exciting places, otherwise eventually the appetite will die.
So that’s a thumbs up for Television Romance,it is ultimately a good song (and yes, like the previous tune it sounds a lot like The 1975 version 2.0 / rebranded), but there’s going to have to be more variety in the future to keep me engrossed.
Pale Waves - Television Romance
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