Sometimes I’m like: What are we doing here? I mean as a band, as songwriters, as, ugh, artists. I sit down to work on a song and put my fingers in the same places they’ve been 100,000 times before. Oh, look, an E chord. Never heard that before. Eventually music starts to gel. […]
Before I bring a song to the band, I usually record a demo at home. It usually won’t be the version that we bring to the stage – let alone what we put on the record – but it’s normally at least 60% of the way there. I’ve learned that if you show up to […]
When we first assembled Heck Reckoners, I was listening to a lot of Preoccupations. I thought I wanted to be in a post-punk band. I was enamored with chorus, trebley bass, synthesizers, drum machines, monotony, baritone vocals, and waves of white noise. None of this took into consideration that our drummer has a rock & […]
Dubbing them the “Deleted Years,” Dave Holmes wrote for Esquire in 2019, [t]he music of the mid-aughts to early-teens is largely gone, lost down a new-millennium memory hole.” He attributes this cultural corona to the collapse of the traditional music industry (and PR machine) and the way the invention of technology (like the iPod, which […]
The first decade of the 2000s was the last in which it felt like there was a distinct divide between mainstream and independent music. On one side you had fans of Norah Jones, Christina Aguilera, and Eminem, and on the other, fans of Arcade Fire, The White Stripes, Wilco, and TV on the Radio. Those […]
I hoped King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard’s newest album Flight b741 would feature a more concise set of songs than their recent, jammier endeavors. Well, be careful what you wish for. While the Gizz keep their songs to three or four minutes on this release (excepting a Wings-esque multipart closer), they’re…um…country rock songs. […]
Anton Checkov said of Leo Tolstoy: ““When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify […]
ON NO NAME, JACK WHITE STRIP(E)S DOWN As a songwriter, Jack White has two modes: cock-strutting rock where he says badass things that nonetheless don’t feel like they’ll lead to actual violence, and soft spoken romantic declarations that nonetheless don’t feel like they’ll lead to actual fucking. White’s retro fascination extends not only to […]
SONG BANDS VS. VIBE BANDS There are two types of bands: bands that fuck and bands that suck. No, I’m kidding. Besides that, it’s Song bands and Vibe bands. Even without listening you can usually distinguish Song and Vibe bands. Look at a track listing. If you’ve 12 songs averaging three minutes each, […]
Chat Pile’s logo is a bunch of indecipherable scribbles like a death metal band, but their music actually has musical DNA from a different genre that began at around the same time in the later 1980s: pigfuck. Robert Christgau dubbed the term “pigfuck” to describe the aural violence enacted by early Sonic Youth albums.* […]