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| DINOSAUR JR, JR “It’s quite nice, the bands that we’re compared to are good and stuff,” says Yuck’s Daniel Blumberg. “I love those bands.” |
Somewhere along the line in the history of music journalism, writing about the way a record sounds turned into drawing up a laundry list of predecessor comparisons. Roughly around the time the second rock and roll record was made, I'd guess. It's a problem that's become further convoluted in recent years as the vast well of influence-bait has grown deeper, and we've entrenched ourselves in a postmodern retro morass of referential one-upmanship. The ever-shortening recovery period between the reemergence of music past has led to hash-tag (and headline) criticism. Yuck: LOL via @DinoJr #grunge
That
might not be fair. The extremely young, extremely hyped UK indie guitar
band Yuck aren't merely grunge revivalists after all. They also seem
like they're into shoegaze too.
Those
two back-trending approaches dominate the 12 songs on February's
homonymous Fat Possum debut. "Suck" finds Billy Corgan guitar squalls
treading water alongside Thurston Moore vocals. The plaintive, acoustic
"Suicide Policeman" is a new-millennium Evan and Juliana trading druggy,
lovelorn verses; while "The Wall" and "Holing Out" alternate between
scorched and clean J Mascis guitar tones and muffled vocal effects,
grunge-era lo-fi production, and blissed-out harmonies. Other of the
slower songs seem like My Bloody Valentine tracks performed at a show
where they forgot to unpack most of their guitar pedals.
None
of which is meant as criticism. The record just might be brilliant.
Lead single "Get Away" is among the most exciting three and half minutes
of guitar music released all year. The question is: does that
excitement inhere in the anachronistic novelty — the intrigue of a past
artifact smuggled forward into the future?
I
don't think so. The record is successful both in its referential
overload and as its own discrete entity, in much the way you need not be
familiar with everything hinted at in an allusion-rich text or film to
follow the basics of the plot. How many UK indie kids own copies of Green Mind or Dirty, anyway?
For
his part, guitarist and vocalist Daniel Blumberg (who shares
songwriting and vocal duties with partner Max Bloom) isn't trying to
bullshit away the comparisons like so many other of his disingenuous
contemporaries. The two made a previous stab at teenage-retroism with
the moderately successful throwback-style outfit Cajun Dance Party.
"It's
not frustrating," Blumberg says of the constant comparisons to his
grungy forefathers, in a halting, rather difficult interview. "I think
people, when they listen to the record, they can have their own
relationship with it. There's a few songs people pick up on for certain
comparisons. Yeah. It's quite nice, the bands that we're compared to are
good and stuff. I love those bands. It's really cool. I don't know, we
weren't trying to do anything, or we didn't have any aims or goals apart
from making songs we were happy with."
Blumberg
seems to be hinting at a future departure in style, but whether that
was imminent in newer material he was working on, or even what that
direction might be, he couldn't say. He's 21 years old, after all, with a
lengthy musical career ahead. Just don't ask him to plot it out. "I
think we've just started and we're just writing songs," he says. "If I
was, like, we're gonna make this album, and we really had an intention. .
. . " It wouldn't have worked? He never finishes that thought.
don't know what we'll be doing in eight years, though," Blumberg says. Who knows what any
bands will be doing by then? What does a retread of a rehash of a
retro-movement sound like? As long as the songs are this good, who
really cares?
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