We’ve got nothing against guitar music per se here at The Grain. The absence of any of the decade’s most successful purveyors of trad-oriented indie rock in our Top 50 tunes list hasn’t been intentional, more a natural expression of our several individual tastes.
If it seems faintly polemical to have included so few ‘nu-rock’ and ‘garage-rock revival’ artists, this wasn’t a conscious decision on our part. It’s just that, having grown-up with the progressive, eclectic hip-hop and dance culture of the nineties, it would seem strange to us to acknowledge with more than a cursory glance bands like The Libertines, The Strokes, Razorlight, The Killers, and The White Stripes, bands who produced music that was not merely mediocre and conservative, but apparently in direct contradiction to the notion of linear history as an ongoing evolutionary process.
But let’s not be too clumsy about this. Let’s not dismiss in totum all those collectives that just so happened to foreground six-string instrumentalism. The Walkmen, for starters, were one guitar band with a relatively orthodox musical blueprint who managed to sound fresh and enticing, and nowhere so spectacularly as on 2004’s ‘The Rat’.
Like their TotD coevals Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear, The Walkmen were synthesizing a number of ‘classic’ sounds. But, perhaps because the pool of influence was much wider than Beatles-Byrds-Hendrix or Talking Heads-Television-The Jam, the result is an overall amalgam a good deal greater than the sum of its parts.
If ‘The Rat’ is heavily redolent of punk-era paragons like ‘Teenage Kicks’ and ‘Ever Fallen in Love’, there’s also something around the edges to suggest awareness and justification for such indebtedness, like an acknowledgment that the idealistic essence of these source relics has been tragically warped in the intervening years (and this nicely augmented by the Lynchian monochrome of the video). Here is a fierce pathos and romantic yearning for the buried treasure of pop history, rather than cynical, transparent maneuvering on the part of pastiche-loving poseurs.
The Strokes, but with soul, then.
AN
