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I feel bad about stuff like this.
I am all about, you know, bringing the Rock (in the happiest, nicest, anti-rockistest way you can, of course), being a big old metalhead and really loving Thin Lizzy and all those crazy retrofied German Space Rock bands.
But not, I guess, about bringing the Rock BACK—not positioning myself, or a band positioning itself, as saviour(s) of rock, or harking back, to a truer, rockinger era. And that, I think, is pretty clear is what guys like these are doing. It's definitely a very fine line, and I don't have a total handle on it yet. But when you listen to Comets on Fire or Colour Haze or Dozer, I mean—these dudes are a bunch of stoner/psych rockers. Full stop. So you could definitely say, you know, 'who's the president' to these fellows as well. But I also think that when you listen to Wolfmother, somewhere between the band name, the song titles, and the actual (rather dull, I'm afraid) songs, you can hear these dudes saying to each other, 'Dude, bro. We should totally start a totally old-school band, like Zep and Ozzy and shit.'
Except in Australian.
And I'm not saying that the dudes in Dozer formed a band out of the organic primordial mass to bring perfect beautiful music to the children of the world. But. The name 'Dozer' is like, really dorky. The name 'Wolfmother' is really dorky, but only in the way that someone obviously sat down and tried to think of the old-schoolest, hesherest band name they could think of. The dudes in Dozer, or Colour Haze, I think, *are* heshers, or at least anachronistic rockers of some stripe, and therefore don't do everything with an eye to falling within a very rigid hesher archetype. They fall within the archetype most of the time, but not on every note—and that's what makes it interesting.
That's my thing, I guess. Wolfmother, and other guys who are Bringing The Rock, are essentially playing pseudo-covers. They're like in college when your friends told you, DUDE WE'RE GONNA BE IN A METAL BAND! (or techno, or ska, or whatever) And they wrote some songs that sounded just like metal, and it was kind of funny. But very few of those bands are you gonna wanna put on your stereo a year later and rock out, in earnest. |
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