rock snob, again.
1) The Gang of Four revival is an interesting thing. None of the bands that clearly owe their musical lives to Entertainment! do anything remotely political lyrically. What's particularly irritating is how the most interesting aspects of post-punk guitar (specifically the styles of GoF's Andy Gill and Public Image, Ltd.'s Keith Levene) don't seem to filter into the current generation of bands, who don't do anything that sonically compelling. Oddly enough, the only guitarists that seem to take any direct lessons from the post-punk school of noise guitar are Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and Tom Morello. It's also equally amusing how post-punk revivalists have come along before, but were roundly ignored before Franz Ferdinand. In the early 90s, Elastica was 10 years too early with ripping off Gang of Four, Wire, XTC, and the Stranglers (with half of those, they were literally ripping them off -- Wire and the Stranglers sued them for songwriting credit successfully and the band never recovered.) Part of Elastica never getting its due has to do with not earning it and ripping riffs on their first self-titled album, but another part of it has to do with three-fourths of the original lineup being female in the macho grunge trip that alt-rock was at times: if Justine Frischmann was ten years younger and put out The Menace today, the hipsters would be all over it.
2) I dug out my burned copy of the Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas, and "The Best Death Metal Band in Denton" is still one of my all-time favorites:
When you punish a person for dreaming his dream,
Don't expect him to thank or forgive you.
The best ever death metal band out of Denton
Will in time both outpace and outlive you.
Hail Satan!
He played that song live when he played Grinnell a couple years back, and it seriously affected me, because I had a friend back in Denver named Rob who was very much death metal and goth (although he did like classic rock and the Cure a lot). We started a band together (he inspired me to take up guitar and bass guitar) and it kept going until after the Columbine shooting, when he left our high school because he was tired of being harassed for his clothes and piercings. We had the same after-school jobs, spent damn near all our time together. I lost track of him after winter break of my freshman year in college; he said he was headed off for Phoenix and promised to email or call, with whatever buxom female he happened to have on his arm at any given time.
Unfortunately, I have to plead out of Darnielle playing at the Troubadour a week from tonight. Sleater-Kinney, the Mountain Goats, and the Dinosaur Jr reissues are the CDs on my "purchase first" list.
3) The new White Stripes album sounds like Jack White may be very close to the wall of what he can do with only two people in a studio -- it's still good, but you wonder what he could do if he didn't restrict himself to his strict rules. Of course, maybe that's the magic of the whole thing: the restraints. The New Yorker's critic doesn't seem to find the rules endearing, though, especially when it concerns Meg White's untrained way with a drum kit.
2) I dug out my burned copy of the Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas, and "The Best Death Metal Band in Denton" is still one of my all-time favorites:
When you punish a person for dreaming his dream,
Don't expect him to thank or forgive you.
The best ever death metal band out of Denton
Will in time both outpace and outlive you.
Hail Satan!
He played that song live when he played Grinnell a couple years back, and it seriously affected me, because I had a friend back in Denver named Rob who was very much death metal and goth (although he did like classic rock and the Cure a lot). We started a band together (he inspired me to take up guitar and bass guitar) and it kept going until after the Columbine shooting, when he left our high school because he was tired of being harassed for his clothes and piercings. We had the same after-school jobs, spent damn near all our time together. I lost track of him after winter break of my freshman year in college; he said he was headed off for Phoenix and promised to email or call, with whatever buxom female he happened to have on his arm at any given time.
Unfortunately, I have to plead out of Darnielle playing at the Troubadour a week from tonight. Sleater-Kinney, the Mountain Goats, and the Dinosaur Jr reissues are the CDs on my "purchase first" list.
3) The new White Stripes album sounds like Jack White may be very close to the wall of what he can do with only two people in a studio -- it's still good, but you wonder what he could do if he didn't restrict himself to his strict rules. Of course, maybe that's the magic of the whole thing: the restraints. The New Yorker's critic doesn't seem to find the rules endearing, though, especially when it concerns Meg White's untrained way with a drum kit.