"Have I heard of the Shore?" he thought, as he tore open yet another in the seemingly endless pile of non-descript manila envelopes. "The Shore... the Shore--yeah that sounds sort of familiar." But how could he be positive? Surely he'd seen his fair share of pseudo-psyche record covers married with pseudo-British beauties over the past year or so with equally passive band names--and at this point, it was getting hard to really tell the difference. At first listen, the inert grandeur seems incredibly familiar, even beyond the band's glaring (if loving) rehash of the Verve's dreampop brilliance--had he heard this music before? Indeed, he had heard this music before--on every flashy commercial spot and teen drama on television today. The Shore were that band--the floppy-haired, amorphous group that plays in the background as beautiful twenty-somethings surf, cruise, and dry-hump like teenagers every week. Sure, they change their name a lot to confuse music journalists, but their look and their sound, are unmistakable--they are that band.

If, as Steve Albini so famously wrote in The Problem With Music, the space between indie and major labels is a trench filled with "runny, decaying shit," the last decade or so have been marked by a sinister bridge construction project that allows certain bands from this side to get quick tastes of the honey over on their side. And who's funding this project? Advertising firms and soundtrack supervisors. And in doing their damnedest to provide car commercial fodder that's hip-but-not-too-hip, advertising firms have all but accidentally created a new tier in the scheme of popular music--one that stands right in the middle of that bridge above the trench. Just think of all the dozens of bands whose names you can't remember, who've made a career out of writing derivative yet inoffensive GAP-ready pop of late--can you imagine them ever getting airplay without the aid of such avenues? Without these bridges, how would the Shore--who, in spite of their plainness, do admittedly transcend nearly all of their unfortunate peers--really have a place in the record collections of floppy-haired American kids? I can't tell the difference anymore.