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popular culture, lasted all weekend
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A-Frames
SS/Dragnet Records, 2003
After all the crap we've lived through in the first five months of this year, this is the punk rock album that 1993 needs. It came out last year on vinyl, and their next LP is still awaiting CD release. So they got an agenda. We need more agendas. Every song on this record is catchy, but would terrify your average midriff-bearing or mookish pop-punker. No heartbreak or mean girlfriends or fratboy puns on this record. "You are a radical isotope/ I can't get you out of my microscope." Just paranoid rhymes for paranoid times.
It's got cryptic politic over not-quite-Nuggets rock, like the Fall. It's got bouncy, bobbing low end with nightmare treble, like the Swell Maps. Caustic, spitting, collapsing backwards pop like Wire and Mekons. And just when it couldn't get anymore jagged, in comes a song with a big Spector-Ramones-J&MC echo, with the chorus "Survalence, survalance, survalence camera/I'm in love with ya"
Simple, twangy but souless guitar riffs intertwine and layer. Off-balance but unfunky grooves pop over trash can percussion. Only the most rudimentary muiscal skills are needed to play these songs, not even the ablity to tune. But man is it is catchy.
Postpunk was suburban kids failing to play supa-heavy Jamacain dub. This is one step removed from that, and their edgy humor trumps the new-no-wave comming out of Brooklyn (as great as that stuff is). These guys have earned their angles. Yeah, the singing is done in a London accent, and the band is from Seattle, but if that gets them in the dissaffected mood, power to them.
Available from Midheaven Mailorder
posted Thursday, May 29, 2003
Review: Black Keys
thickfreakeness
Fat Possum Records, 2003
They sound like they delta blues end of Cream. Or the soulful end of Traffic. Or the raw end of Steppenwolf. There isn't much about this, other than the drum-heavy production, which would make this record sound out of place in 1969. So why recommend this? Cause the Black Keys perform magic in not making this sound stale. Somehow, it's orignal.
Blues rock calcified into a series cliches pretty quickly- long solos, thin vocals, complicated riffing, fake-Dylan and fake-voodoo lyrics. The Black Keys do an amazing job at avoiding all these suburban guitar store, bald-spot-and-pony-tail traps, and uncover why blues rock was so appealing at first. And they do it walking down a different road than the White Stripes, even though the bands share a power-duo point of departure.
Cream and Traffic and Steppenwolf were pop bands that knew how to put a song together, and had singers who knew how to drive that song home. They weren't waiting for the guitar solos. Dan Auerbach can riff for sure, but it's his vocals that make this work. They write songs, not blues. They fall back on bouncy Muscle Shoals chords, not Hendrix freakouts. There are a ton of no-bass duos now, but the Black Keys find a different set of textures than the rest. Midnight In Your Eyes sounds like a perfect song that's been around forever. And they pull off a Junior Kimbrough cover that is every bit as hypnotic as Junior. May they forever avoid the rib cookoff circuit.
posted Friday, May 02, 2003
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