Don't Believe The Hype: Wavves


9 comments:

envythedead said...
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decrepittapes said...

I put bands like Pink Reason & Little Claw in a different category because they use lo-fi to fit their aesthetic needs and to create a mood with their music.

Some might argue that the shit-gaze bands I am ranting against are doing the same thing... but I honestly don't hear it. To me it all comes off as being very empty (like you said) and devoid of any sort of warmth and humanness that makes the original lo-fi movement so great.

Anonymous said...

I know what you mean, I personally have a major problem with 99% of Post Rock recorded after Spiderland. I check a few singles blogs to try and find the odd gem, but sometimes it's really difficult to understand what all the excitement is about, I loved the Pink Reason record you posted so it's not like I'm allergic to new music, but whatever ineffable quality good music posseses (Factor X?) I don't hear it all that often, I guess The Thermals are a good example of a hyped up band that actually delivered but there is a lot of lifeless junk out there. Sometimes I get the feeling that people join bands as a kind of lifestyle choice, but I don't want to sound mean either so I'll leave it there.

Anonymous said...

would you post the new one, "wavvves" if you have it? its not original or ground breaking, but its good pop music, and i do like me some ear candy sometimes- really enjoy all the music you post! thanks-

decrepittapes said...

Post-Rock is another great example of the same thing. The term "post-rock" was actually coined in a review for Bark Psychosis's Hex (essential album if you don't have it) and that album really redefined what could be done in the context of rock music.

That was 1994, fast forward 10-15 years and all post-rock has become is just instrumental rock that builds to a crescendo at the end of the song. This of course is an extreme simplification of what's happening in that genere. But the point is it's gone from pushing musical boundaries to just treading the same water for almost a decade.

When I look for new music and I see it labeled as "post-rock", I immediately read it as music that going to sound like 100's of other bands I've already heard... and very rarely am I wrong. Even post-rock bands that used to be good (Do Make Say Think) are falling into the trap of those same conventions.

Anonymous said...

was there originally a write-up to go with this?

Anonymous said...

Let me say I've had opportunity to see both No Age and Times New Viking live (for free, luckily); both bands put on good, decent shows, but were really nothing great. Certainly they didn't have any songs that were all that memorable; it really is the network of blogs that allows for bands like that to "break" really quickly, beyond what they've achieved as performers. If anything, this is bad for the musicians; No Age could be a really decent band in a couple years if they keep working hard. But being hailed as the saviors of rock or the progenitors of some new movement so early in their career is just strange...

Anonymous said...

Yeah I bought Hex at the time and liked it, but it was only recently I learned that a review of this was the origin of the term post-rock, I know what you mean about stuff like this kind of broadening what can be done in Rock music but I don't know if I really feel much of it, I saw Tortoise around the time of the first or second record (I forget) I guess on the back of the Slint connection and thought it was pretty good, and I'd never seen a band swap instruments on stage before but I dunno...here's something I wrote on a now dead blog:

For me Post-Rock is Slint, not Tortoise or Bark Psychosis or whatever, although some of this stuff was good it was a different thing, I think it's kind of analogous to Post-Punk, say Wire (at least on the first two records) can deconstruct the form of Punk as much as they like but if they completely rejected its genealogy then what they were doing would no longer be Post-Punk but something else.

A simple (minded?) interpretation perhaps, but maybe we need a new term: Post-Punk-Rock maybe?

If so I'd like to posit Nomeansno as it's exemplar.

Anonymous said...

I factor this, each generation rejects the prior one as an inherited right. They turn their backs on the past and say what I'm doing (listening to) is cooler, more modern, more hip, in any event just look at popular music today and ask yourself if you had invisioned the future to be so culturaly divided.
In short, look how the 80s changed from the 70s and 90s from the 80s and so on so forth. Todays music seems not to have much of an decernable identity (You could argue) maybe after it plays out and the dust settles well be able to identify this decade and its music more clearly with a second listen.