It’s my life
It is my voice
It is stupid
It is my noise– “My Noise”, Superchunk
“Radical Dads” is yet another terrible bandname.
But Universal Coolers is a great record.
Or maybe it’s not. I can’t trust myself to tell, when this is an album that pushes so many of my pleasure buttons. I am helpless to resist.
This is ’90s Amerindierock all over again, before that stopped meaning shouted emotional desperation over skull-drilling trebly hooks played on noisy lo-fi guitars, and started meaning ukeleles and bowler hats and Mason jars.
This is the sound of teenage and early-twenties aimlessness, and timeless epic melodic melancholy; of kids with too much education and too much cheap beer conspiring to produce something deceptively-ambitious while trying – and failing miserably – to come off like they don’t care at all.
It’s the sound of fearing that your options are closing down, even as impossibly-wide vistas open up in all their vertiginous and terrifying beauty.
If you still play your old records by Superchunk and Sleater-Kinney and Built to Spill and GbV and Archers of Loaf and Pavement, you need this, trust me.
And in true indie fashion, it’s only seven inches bucks on Bandcamp, so get on that.
I’m not quite as sold (yet) on Pile (though, at least that’s a way better bandname), who draw more from the post-hardcore wing of that era – tricky shifting time signatures, tangled dissonant guitars (think your Polvos and Fugazis and Jawboxes), drums that slam like Bitch Magnet’s, and vocals that sound more than a bit indebted to Black Francis.
Still, if it’s maybe just a little bit intentionally-impenetrable, at least you can’t accuse it of being content to be polite:
Pile’s You’re Better Than This is also available from Bandcamp at the low low price of either 4 or 5 bucks, I can’t tell (as much as I love Bandcamp and everything it stands for, am I the only one that sometimes finds the page layouts confusing? Am I just old?)
Time for a classic Onion article:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-only-7-band-names-remaining,5697/Report
Awesome.
In retrospect, Archers of Loaf were just ahead of the curve, with a pre-emptively terrible name.Report
I’m listening to Universal Cooler on Spotify now. Enjoying it so far.
I’ve been hearing more and more 90s in new stuff lately.Report
Here was my day yesterday:
1.) Read review for album.
2.) Pull it up on Spotify out of idle curiosity; press play.
3.) Somewhere around third or fourth track, start frantically throwing digital money at Bandcamp, because I didn’t even realize how much I missed these sounds.
4.) Listen to album at least ten more times before bed.
I think I am in love. Which is weird, because I’ve kind of been on a techno/electronic kick lately.Report
Oh my gosh. I fell in love before the lyrics even started.Report
i bought the radical dads thing sight unheard (wait what?). so if it’s really good or really sucks i’ll write something.Report
Yipes. It’s keyed into a pretty specific aesthetic, one that I’m not sure is your bag (though you said you eventually came around on Pavement) so I’m curious as to whether it works as well without those associations.Report
i like pavement’s first album a lot, and progressively less so every other album.
it’s ok so far. sort of like my reaction to viet cong (the band, not the militant resistance force). like i wouldn’t be bothered if it was playing in a bar, but i probably wouldn’t ask the bartender HEY WHAT IS THIS and she goes WHAT? and i say THE MUSIC WHAT’S PLAYING and she says RADICAL DADS and i think she’s said RADIAL CADS and i say THAT’S A TERRIBLE NAME and she shrugs and gets on with it because there are bills to pay and i am not that interesting at the end of the day.Report
RADIAL CADS…
Not to bad.Report
they’d play that terrible faux americana everyone’s-almost-into-bluegrass thing though.Report
Like the link in the OP: “The Mason Jars”. (I haven’t heard the new Screaming Females, but that girl can shred. I’ve heard they are great live).Report
Looks like we’ll be seeing Screaming Females next weekend, along with Run the Jewels and VietCong.Report
Yeah, I’d like to see SF.
(Should I shamefully admit here that I STILL haven’t heard Run The Jewels? The Cold Vein – which left me a little cold, finding it easier to admire than repeat-play – was as far as I ever got with El-P. And HOLY CRAP, that was 14 years ago).Report
Oh man, Run the Jewels 2 is amazing, spectacularly angry, and almost entirely not linkable here. Killer Mike is incredible; El-P is fun and has yet to utter a line that was safe for work.Report
Do I like that? I’m not sure. There’s an aura of “we’re not really trying that hard” laid kind of thick over everything (starting with the band name).
Re Pile, “more than a bit indebted” is nicely understated.
Hey, where is everybody? Oh, wait.Report
Counterpoint: I have had this stuck in my head all day:
http://youtu.be/mcTSIYGAf0s
There’s also a lyric on the title track that jumped out at me: “the century’s stacked against me.” I like that line a lot on its own anyway, but on such a throwback to pre-millennial indie rock, it’s even better (songs from that era and scene were often *about* that era and scene, so it feels like a nice callback, and an admission that things are no longer the same at the same time).
“Slammer” and “Don’t Go” are also really catchy. Hell, the whole album is IMO. Even the song where they let the guy with the unfortunately-Fred-Schneider-like delivery sing has really catchy music (to be clear, I like Fred just fine on his own records – but that sassy, slightly-peeved tone is not what you want if you are trying to do the whole powerful spoken-word-over-rock-music thing. It just comes across as too silly).Report
Well, “In The Water” leaves me more convinced that the singer’s voice is not an affectation, which is a little more endearing.
The technology-driven democratization of music has generally been a good thing, but some bands could benefit from someone in the control room saying, you were sharp on that one line. Giving it another try might possibly detract from the spontaneity and authenticity of the first take, so we’ll keep that one for now. But getting it right without losing those qualities is what separates the artists from the hobbyists.Report
@krogerfoot – And here is where I must shake my old man fist and complain about digital downloads, since I can’t seem to locate recording/production info for the record. So I don’t know if they produced/recorded it themselves or not.
Still, while I get where you are coming from in theory, GbV’s Ric Ocasek-produced record isn’t better than the ones they did when they were hobbyists (hell, they even s*itcanned most of the one they did with Albini, which you’d think could have been a simpatico collaboration). Same goes for Pavement and Nigel Godrich – keep your Terror Twilight and give me Slanted and Enchanted any day. This is a genre that’s sort of built around not just allowing homemade imperfection, but celebrating it, and this record’s got life.Report
Your track record is undeniably solid, so I’m certainly not ruling out liking Radical Dads sometime in the near- to mid-future. But I don’t think I agree that the genre is about celebrating the imperfections, as much as not fixing something that isn’t broken, that’s doing the job in an unexpected way.Report
I don’t think I agree that the genre is about celebrating the imperfections, as much as not fixing something that isn’t broken, that’s doing the job in an unexpected way.
I sense an echo here of a debate I had with a musician friend of mine, who was complaining about some newer artist (TNV, maybe) going the lo-fi route here and now in the modern day.
To him, he recorded lo-fi back in the day out of practical and economic necessity (4-track 4EVA!), but if kids are doing it today, it’s an affectation and he just won’t stand for it – pristine digital recording can be had off your laptop (by now from your phone probably), so either they are using a Garageband setting to make it sound like that, or intentionally using old crappy recording equipment.
My argument was that all art, pretty much, is affectation, and if what they are doing is achieving a sound and a feeling they (and I) want, then it’s achieving a sound and feeling they/I want, and who cares how they got it?
If I look at a photo taken in 1915 and one taken in 2015 then Instagram-filtered to look like it was taken in 1915, and I can’t tell the difference (and I like the photos), then what’s the difference?
(That said, dressing up like an old-tyme carnival barker is still ridiculous).
I guess my point is “sharpness” (or any other imperfection) can be looked at like “grain” in a photo or in a film; it contributes its own qualities to the finished product. Some sculptures have a rough finish because the artist died before finishing them (or is incapable of doing any better), and some have a rough finish because the artist thought the sculpture would look best that way and stopped polishing (or, she used rough imprecise cuts to begin with).Report
Wait, I found the credits:
“All songs recorded and mixed by Julian Fader and Carlos Hernandez at Gravesend Recordings at The Silent Barn, except for “Flight to NZ,” which was recorded instrument-wise by Keith Souza and Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets, and then we added the vocals at Gravesend.
All songs mastered by Keith Freund.”
The use of “recorded” there, rather than “produced”, is probably getting at your point.Report
I don’t think I’m taking the side of your musician friend here. You and I seem to have the same reasons for thinking the way we do, it’s just that RD felt you up the right way and didn’t do the same with me.
[Deflecting] What is it with these band names? I’m more and more convinced that we are indeed old men yelling at clouds. But then again, twenty goddamn years ago I was annoyed that every new band had a one-syllable “whatever, dude, it’s just a band name” name: Cell, Spoon, Plug, Clad, Neck. Well, now that I revisit those unpleasant memories, I remember it wasn’t just the single-syllables, but the deliberate lack of evocativeness. Pavement, qua band name, annoyed the hell out of me, until I finally heard them. Lotion. Before we’re (mercifully) dead, all the bands we ever liked will have names that sound to the kids the way The Exploding Plastic Inevitable sounded to us.Report
Remember when both The Verve and The Verve Pipe not only both had songs on the radio, but songs on the same radio station formats?
Good times.Report
Say, that reminds me: What the sam hill is TVN?Report
I generally like a deliberate lack of evocativeness/”blank” names. I think it offers the artist more freedom to change their sound if they want, plus it feels like a “code”, a secret handshake – it’s up to YOU to know what the band sounds like. I generally don’t like bandnames that are too on-the-nose, where you know just what you will get when you hit “play”.
But then again, that’s sort of what I came up on. “Smiths”. “New Order”. “Wire”. “U2”. And the uber-unknown-variable-name of them all: “X”.
(Are you watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? One NY character warns another not to wear yellow in their neighborhood, “…or The Crips will think you are in The Banana Boys. It’s a new gang, all the good gang names were already taken.”)Report
Oh, sorry, TNV – Times New Viking.Report
“Oh, sorry, TNV – Times New Viking.”
Aha! Wait, what?
Funny, the five band names you gave as examples would have worked just as well with my point. They’re all pretty much great awesomely evocative names, as Gene Simmons once explained about U2. They’re open to more interesting interpretations than the mostly fictional examples I gave.
That Banana Boys gag is a pretty good one, though.Report
Band names should be euphonious or deliberately dissonant.Report
Is there a middle ground there? If so, how wide? Hurry—I’m about to file a trademark for my side project, “Glideless Schrankh.”Report
Hmmm, you are losing me. I am not sure how “Smiths” (did they also consider “Joneses” or “Generic Englishmen” as possible names?) or “X” are any more evocative than “Pavement” – that is, it seems to me to be a name that kind of means nothing at all.
Is it that “Pavement” and “Spoon” are simple physical objects with fixed meanings, rather than concepts (but, “U2” was a physical object?)….Report
Axes Denied is a cool band name. I love the pun (but I LIKE puns).
Were I choosing a name… you could hardly go wrong with
“A Fool and His Money” … but that’s already been taken, hasn’t it?
[yes, a band is Close Enough to performance art. You don’t take someone else’s name, it just Isn’t Done /endbritaccent].Report
We are talking past each other at this point. Gene Simmons gave a wonderful explanation of why U2 was a great band name and White Lion a terrible one, but my Google-fu is weak this eve, and then again, he was a Hebrew teacher and I’m just a hobo.
I spent a month or so on the road with X’s tour manager. He told me several times that he ragged on John Doe to change his stage name. “I kept telling him, you’re just a regular guy, y’know? You should call yourself Joe Doe. ‘Cause you’re just a regular Joe, you know what I mean?”Report
Also, TNV was in this post.Report
90s (and Pavement):
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Heh. I saw these guys a year or two ago at a little book/record store here, and yeah, they were probably the first ones I noticed really bringing this sound back (though they favor really twisty Helium-type songs; they are good players, but I sometimes found my attention wandering, because the hooks are a little less prominent to me).Report