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when i first heard her i had never heard anything so bleak or obscure before. i picked up the last issue of careless talk costs lives in a tiny newsagents that has since closed down. it's inexplicable why they had it, unless someone had subscribed to it through them and never picked it up, they were so small and finding something like that was an absolute treasure, the kind of special gem that i always wandered around the town alone searching for but so rarely ever found. i didn't understand the magazine at all, it didn't fit into my kerrang/terrorizer worldview. I was like, who is this for? I had never heard of any of the bands until i saw a reference to mudhoney and then knew it must be on the right level. back then i was starved for music and the idea of indie actually seemed like something special and exciting that noone else i knew had heard of. the writing had so much love for music but at a level of such disregard for commercialism or wider cultural impact it made all the details of lonely unglamorous teenage life seem so vivid, as if walking the town with headfones on was important, as if my dreary town and bedroom were as important a place for style as i had previous thought a stage was. as if there was the potential for some band to be doing the most important art and live down the street or maybe hang out down by the river or be walking around town like i was, i just hadn't found them yet. people criticise everret true for his annoying self importance and personal style of journalism, and that whole indie pop scene for having no ambition, but when it resonates with you it can change everything. i was starting to buy clothes from charity shops and changing my image and discovering sy and this idea of underground music being more real precisely because of its lack of impact on mainstream culture, whereas before that had kind of lessened its power for me. so i read it and remembered the name scout niblett and managed to find one mp3 which was wet road. that's the kind of experience music is all about.
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