Tag Archives: music

Zombie Rock and the Duke of Hazard

What’s going on with hipster music? It’s an interesting question. About ten years ago I wanted to write a piece for my local weekly, Baltimore City Paper, on how the fuzzed-out, overdriven indie rock of my youth, largely springing from the AmRep and Touch & Go labels, had been replaced by another genre with the same name but sporting not only a totally different style of music, but seemingly a different ethos towards life. They never bought my pitch and I moved on to other things for most of a decade.  In that decade, it seems like rebellion turned into reflection which turned into introspection which just devolved wholesale into whining.

This week we’re got the LA Weekly treating us to a pretty snarky, if not accurate, takedown of the 20 most annoying hipster bands. I take some issue with putting TV on the Radio, who treated me to a phenomenally energetic and sweaty set in London in 2004, on the list, but for the bands on the list I’ve heard, it’s spot-on. Beirut has the sound of a precious kid who just discovered world music, pilfering from the Balkans and the Middle East equally blithely. The Decembrists play the same sort of bland pop that was just taking over a decade ago. As for Black Keys, remember Jon Spencer Blues Explosion? People accused him of stealing from the black musical tradition (a silly premise, given how most of what’s good about American music comes from free-flowing musical miscegenation), but at least he smashed things and “fucked shit up.” Most of the music in the LA Weekly piece is more about image and solipsistic preening than the raw emotional release that blues, rock and punk are famous for. It’s a funny piece, but there is some anger in the last write-up, a takedown of Bon Iver:

What happened to us as a generation that this guy gets to bear our sonic torch? Those who came before us rocked, bumped and grinded. They exuded raw sexuality and riotous anger; sweaty human realism. They hoovered drugs or angrily rejected them, they humped strangers in club bathrooms in adolescent indiscretion; they broke shit, laughed, cried, partied on rooftops or in warehouses, exercised cultural demons and personal failures, made spectacles. We, instead, get a whiny guy who built his own studio in the woods; perfectly exemplifying that narcissistic hipster ethos of “Whatever man, I’m just gonna go over here and be chill, I don’t want to be bothered or have my mellow harshed.” Bon Iver coos the celebratory ballads of hip poseurs who refuse to get their hands dirty, that is, unless that filth is quaint and photogenic.

Well said.

There are a couple of different issues going on with rock music lately — Sasha Frere-Jones is particularly trenchant in his examination of the lack of miscegenation in a New Yorker piece from a few years back. He also points out that “pop music is no longer made of just a few musical traditions; it’s a profusion of strands, most of which don’t intersect, except, perhaps, when listeners click ‘shuffle’ on their iPods.”

For this reason, Michael Jackson was the last pop star in the way that Kurt Cobain was the last rock star — there are so many subgenres and subsets now with the new media that it seems like it might be hard to have that one unifying figure. More to the point with punk and guitar music, one can see some kind of clear line between the fifties rebels, the hippies, the punks, and grunge/aggressive nineties loud guitar music. “Wild Thing” played really loud is a pretty great anthem no matter what decade you’re in, if you’re into guitar sounds. Black Flag covered “Louie Louie” as a sort of goofily, violently frustrated punk anthem in the eighties, and  the glorious Laughing Hyenas covered “I Want You” by the Troggs regularly — reclaiming heart-on-the-sleeve anger for the grunge generation from the MC5’s revolutionary fervor. A lot of the early punk sounds a lot more ’50s than ’60s. There was continuity.

Many of the bands slammed in the LA Weekly‘s piece emphasize style over substance, image over guts and cuteness over beauty. (Watch Nataly Dawn’s precious annoucement to her fans if you don’t believe me.) Even in deep in the underground this has been true for most of the last decade. For example, in my erstwhile home of Baltimore, bands were always high on the theatrics but there was also a core of good rock songwriting underneath — Buttsteak and Lee Harvey Keitel Band took pleasure in outlandish names and bountiful literary and philosophical references, but they were good musicians and songwriters, too. A bit later, Oxes dominated the Baltimore scene. They wrote instrumental math rock, played wireless, and their schtick was to run around the audience mugging. Seen once, it seemed to push boundaries — but seen more than that, it seemed like self-conscious schtick. Later still, Dan Deacon got huge with his whole Wham City collective, basing his style on audience participation and performance with laptop electronica songs.

Rock and roll’s death has been proclaimed many times, and each time it proves its resilience. Lately maybe it’s a bit zombified, to borrow from another hipster trope, by navel-gazing one-man shows backing themselves up. But some good can come of all this: one of more intriguing acts I’ve heard lately is Adam Brewer from Hazard, Kentucky who follows in the great tradition of other Appalachian hollerers such as Hasil Atkins. But this isn’t backwoods psychobilly — it’s raw rock and roll.  It seems like no one else in Hazard was interested in playing live with him, so his shows are him singing to a backing tape of his band, of which he is the only member, the Globsters. Some is abrasive noise in the mold of Slap-a-Ham records, but much of it actually displays a refreshing honesty laid over genuine melody; a shiny penny of a song emerging from a zombie-grave dirtclod.

Check out “Pretty Women” (“pretty women, rockin’ and rollin’, gimme a beer, I’m high as a kite”), “Freddy Krueger” (“I’m not afraid of Freddie Krueger, I am absolutely horrified by you/you’re the one/you’re the one that keeps me up all night”) and “Roll You Up and Smoke You” (“you’re so cute/I just wanna roll you up and smoke you/ we were sitting on the couch/listening to records/I just wanna pass a bowl and smoke it with my baby girl”) are honest youth anthems of rebellion, love and angst. Perhaps there is some hope for rock and roll after all.

Check the mini-documentary from august punk bible Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Thanks to Johnny Cuba for the inspiration.

On the Last Rock Star

Weather Changes Moods

On a hot August evening, the sun was setting over Barricata beach out on the Po Delta. The beach bar was deserted and the lifeguard-cum-barman started up his tractor and began to pick up the sunbeds. To do his work he put on the sound system and turned it up, loud. Sandwiched between the usual forgettable pop, the opening chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” rang out.

Twenty years later after Nirvana blew apart the stilted, machine-produced world of pop music, the commentariat is busy trying to answer a question first posed by fellow travelers Sonic Youth: Nevermind — what was it anyway?  Interpretations range from the interesting — Nirvana burying rock machismo, for a bit anyway, to the blatantly commercial and sentimental.

I bought the record the week it came out — convinced by a friend to pick up the new one when I had my eye on Bleach for pure street cred — and spent the next few weeks learning most of the songs.  The prevailing order of the day — sarcasm and apathy — meant that I had to act completely blasé about Nirvana’s successes. It wasn’t purely baseless: it would have been hard to be a stranger to the independent record label world that begat Nirvana in the home of Squirrel Bait, Slint and Kinghorse. And our “little group” quietly celebrated the mainstreaming of our underground: what else could get a gang of teenage boys to rush home on a Saturday night to watch TV? In this way, Cobain succeeded where our parents did not.

The 1990s were the era that birthed the sensitive man, for a variety of cultural reasons beyond the purview of this post. This new-found sensibility bore heavily on Cobain, who rejected fame’s embrace and embraced the rejected, using his celebrity to openly discuss gayness, feminism, domestic strife, drug use, and depression — conditions that pop culture accepts as part of its landscape now. Because of this, grunge had a gravity that escaped the happy nihilism of most of the first wave of punk bands.

Contrast Cobain’s desperate howl with the gleeful madness of Johnny Rotten telling listeners he’s going over the Berlin Wall.  Cobain mumbles along for most of Nirvana’s hit before exploding in yawps of “a denial” — of what, exactly, it’s never said. Pleasure? Pain? Fame? Life itself? A few years later the man himself exploded tragically, while today, most first-wave punk bands have been able to soldier on, either for lucre (Sex Pistols), pleasure (Buzzcocks) or sheer cussedness (the Fall).

Just as Michael Jackson was the last great pop star, Cobain was the last great rock star. He presented himself as an iconoclast, who stood for ideals and ideas that he thought were greater and better than the dreck that brought him up and enveloped him. It’s unlikely in today’s atomized world of pop music, with its countless sub-genres, that there will never be another. The songwriting, which could appeal to the most craft-oriented REM fans or to the most noise-devoted Albini enthusiasts, reflected this completeness of vision as well.

Nirvana’s meaning and accomplishment will continue to be discussed, debated and exploited.  If they did nothing else, the fact that two decades later in an isolated place far away from Aberdeen, Washington, one can hear a song written by a real human being and not manufactured by a profit-driven industry is no small feat.

Evergreen

Pants off… again. Hate it how that happens.

Note: Those interested in any of the demo files, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to respond. It’s hard for me to keep up with WordPress’s changing architecture, but I’m happy to share what I have. 

Evergreen’s self-titled, and only, record finally got its due with a reissue in 2005 on Temporary Residence. That release appended two tracks from a low-fi single on Hi-Ball released in 1994, which along with a bunch of tape compilations documented Louisville’s wild mid-nineties house party scene, which launched, among others, Will Oldham’s Palace Brothers. The record proper, released in 1996, was recorded by James Murphy, more in print recently for selling out Madison Square Gardens with LCD Soundsystem.

What little writing that is out there on the band focuses on the fact that frontman Sean McLoughlin was a party animal, which is true, but he was also a bit of a poet in his own right, an avid reader of Bukowski, Nietzsche and Burroughs who introduced a bunch of Louisvillians to Fellini via repeated screenings of Satyricon at his rented house out Seventh Street Road near Dixie Highway, his Ford Fairlane parked in the driveway.

The band went through several line-up and name changes, made more confusing by a recent reunion of an early and lesser line-up. They started as a metal band called Revenant, morphed into a popular all-ages funk-hardcore act and ended up as one of guitarist Tim Ruth’s musique concrète projects. (NB: The all-ages act released a retrospective in 2009, Wholeness of the Soul, which lately has sounded pretty good to these ears, and which honestly might be getting more airtime at Premesso in the 2020s that Britt’s Evergreen.)  But none of those are the band that made this record.

“Towing image by contact: e”

From about 1994 to 1998, the band was doing something unique, trying to merge roots punk ‘n’ roll à la Stooges with post-rock à la Krautrock. They’d play, à la Can, all night in the woods. Flyers advised the audience to bring a sleeping bag. Britt Walford melded Jaki Liebezeit-like endurance with southern punk rock defiance: at a 1995 Battle of the Bands in Southern Indiana, the power was cut, but Walford kept on playing until two cops picked him up by his armpits and hauled him off, his legs and arms still twitching like some kind of metronymic insect.

But just like McLoughlin was more than a wild man, Walford was more than the drummer. He was responsible for taking the band in a different direction and developing their later sound. All the good bands in those days, up to Nirvana, wanted to record with Steve Albini or his rapidly-budding protégé, Bob Weston, especially Louisville bands (Crain, Rodan), but I’m not sure if Evergreen benefited from their signature stripped-down sound. They had already recorded a lot of four- and eight-track demos, usually with local engineer and musician Steve Good, who knew their sound well. Their summer 1995 Bob Weston sessions don’t sound that different than their Steve Good eight-track sessions. If anything Evergreen gives stronger performances on the Steve Good sessions.

Steve Good, from the ‘zine Hard Times

Walford understood this. The rumor was (corroborated on some long-dead web-page of Murphy’s) that Atlantic Records, on Murphy’s tip-off, had paid for the Weston demos and wasn’t releasing them since the band wasn’t signing. But a listen to the band’s 1996 record suggests otherwise. Instead of Weston’s bare-bones engineering, it evokes early disco more than early punk, with a bouncy low end propelled by Walford’s drumming and bassist Troy Cox’s subtle, funk-informed lines. McLoughlin, far from being a punk screamer, occasionally even hits a melody that disappears into a miasma of sound, such as in the last 40 seconds or so of “Solar Song.”

The Weston version of the same song doesn’t even come close, which isn’t to impugn Weston, who recorded some of the best rock records from this period. To compare:

The band was a formidable force that summer. They played house parties and no-name Kentucky clubs with raucous locals like the Auditory Clang and the Quiz. But seeing the band perform at Chicago’s Lounge Ax after they’d been mixing at Albini’s, which was then spread across three floors of the engineer’s house, in summer 1995 was electrifying.

He felt responsible

Like contemporaries the Jesus Lizard, the band was a controlled contrast to frontman McLoughlin’s wild antics.  Ruth played a Travis Bean borrowed from Albini and the harmonics on “Glass Highway” sparkled over the tight and syncopated rhythm laid down by Walford and Cox, clad in a qiana shirt. Steve Good’s recording best captures the dynamic control the band laid down that night. Listen as McLoughlin’s delivery of cryptically bleak lyrics steadily becomes more insistent, resolving in a repeated, one-syllable shout. Audio defects in the original.

For show-closer “Pants Off” one of the Louisville contingent stormed the stage and, true to the song’s name, took off his pants and jumped on McLoughlin, who whipped him with the mic chord. The two ended up in a homoerotic tangle, the singer still grunting “roly-poly roly poly! Pants off again! roller coaster roller coaster eyeball head!” as the band bashed on. [Thanks to JDD, who was there, for the lyrical correction.]

Evergreen had a rock and roll spirit forged in the conservative and Baptist city of their birth that was hard to imitate. Later bands on the dance-punk bandwagon would find it impossible to measure up to the intensity and originality of their live show and sound. This is a band that not only wouldn’t, but can’t, do a reunion-album-tour. They weren’t actors playing out a recital. They existed at a particular moment in time that not everyone made it out of all right, and for better or worse, it’s gone.

What’s left is the record. Listen to it. They made it because they knew they wouldn’t last forever.

Live at the Cherokee Blues Club, 1995

Superheroes

To conclude all this southeastern Europe-focused posting on a positive note, I strongly urge all fans of energetic guitar-based music to check out Belgrade’s excellent Stuttgart Online and to buy their infectious album Radost Svakom Domaćinstvu. They definitely capture the dada-street art sound of late seventies Belgrade as immortalized on the anthology Paket Aranzman — particularly the bottom end-heavy sound of Sarlo Akrobat.

There’s not much in English, but here’s a note from Exit Festival 2010, Novi Sad’s annual music festival.   But who needs English?  It’s music.  Take a listen to “Superheroj” right here on YouTube.

Fans of energetic guitar-based music take note: this band has no guitarist.

Thanks to Igor for the recommendation.

Blog will return to south-central European-focused affairs momentarily.