Wildlife Control is Better Than Me

Sometimes I find it really difficult to enjoy great music.

Being a thoroughly amateur musician who once tried to go more professional myself, I’m constantly making comparisons. Melodies, lyrics, and production values can all be liked or hated as a matter of taste, but questions of success have more concrete answers. Even if you omit commercial success – because it’s supposed to be about the music, man, not the money – there are things like number of downloads, demand for live shows, and media coverage that one can look at. And Wildlife Control has me beat by a longshot.

When their innovative stop-motion and time-lapse video tore up YouTube, I moaned. When Analog or Digital, the song in the video, rocketed up Amazon’s charts, I groaned.

None of this would matter if the drummer hadn’t gone to my college.

I didn’t even know the guy; he started very late in my college career. I might have interacted with him a couple times. Somehow that’s far more galling than the success of Meg Hutchinson, who started school one year before me and played stuff far more similar to my music than Wildlife Control does. Maybe the fact that I actually knew her and remember her, even if not all that well, makes it different from sharing only a tenuous academic connection. Or maybe it was the Gizmodo article about their totally awesome tiny recording studio that really got to me, since I also record and produce everything myself.

All this is a shoegazing way of saying that Wildlife Control’s new self-titled album is awfully fun to listen to. And if I can say that when I’m constantly beating myself up, well, you’ll probably enjoy it even more.