the vinyl stitches - all strapped up

(I missed Friday's post due to personal conflicts and alcohol. Mainly the alcohol, stoked by the conflicts. Which is odd, since normally it works the other way around. But that's okay.)

There came a point in my life, about six months ago, where I realized that I was forcing myself to listen to music I didn't really enjoy. I had turned my iPod into a rock critic's wet dream, at the expense of my own pleasure, to fulfill some dated, convoluted standard that was irrelevant to begin with. Which is pretty fucked up.

I wish I could remember the specifics of this epiphany. All I know is I slowly began admitting to myself that I really don't like Captain Beefheart, Faust, or Andrew Bird, but I love shitty noise rock, every Mountain Goats live show ever recorded (pre-2004), and most especially, garage rock. So I deleted all the shitty prog and experimental arty nonsense that was simply exhausting to sit through, and began delving deeper into the mindless caveman garage bands that truly got my dick hard.

I've become quite the pompous ass when it comes to garage, if I do say so myself. I've run through every volume of Nuggets, Pebbles, and Back From the Grave many times over, trying to pick out the few bands in those collections that actually released more than one 7", and in the process developed a love for that raw, noisy, awful racket that accompanies good, true garage rock. It's just attitude and naïvety, kids who just wanted to be rock stars so they bought guitars and figured out a few chords and ripped off the Stones and the Who as close as they possibly could without straight-up copying the riffs note for note. It's primal and pure and it's more exciting than any other music I've encountered in my relatively-short life.

The early-2000s brought on a wave of "garage-revival" bands, most of which were absolute shit. The good ones were "garage" in the vaguest sense possible--somehow the Strokes, the Hives, and the Vines fall into this category, when they were really just playing poppy rock 'n' roll with a healthy dose of punk posturing. The bands that actually tried to sound like their Nuggets idols are the ones that suck the hardest. The Flaming Sideburns, the the Mooney Suzuki, the Datsuns, and an endless stream of other bands that played pristine bullshit rock songs and completely missed the point. Where was the edge? Where was the grime? Where was the fucking soul?

The list of modern revival bands that I actually enjoy is short and sweet: the White Stripes, the Greenhornes, Black Lips, the Hentchmen, and maybe the Kills, if we're pushing the boundaries far enough. But none of them quite have that garage sound down like of one of my favorite new bands, the Vinyl Stitches.

These guys got it right. Which is apparently really fucking hard to do these days. They have more in common with the 80s-90s revival groups that predated the whole movement, and did it better than anyone else--the Gories, Oblivians, the Chesterfield Kings, etc. The Vinyl Stitches probably fall somewhere between those three groups. Take the Nuggets songwriting of the Kings, mix in the Oblivians punk attitude, and filter it through the delicious cacophonous fuzz of the Gories, and you get something close to their new album.

The thing that makes this band stand out among the army of look-a-likes is the energy. They sound just as excited and restless as the original wave of garage rockers. Whether they're plagiarizing that energy wholesale is beside the point, because they're plagiarizing it really, really well. I believe it. They're not celebrating rock 'n' roll in the third-person, in that obnoxious Hellacopters style that permeates everything "revival"--they're just living it. Which is cliché as hell but it's true, so who gives a shit. The Vinyl Stitches set out with "a vision of creating a band that would reproduce the live spirit of rock 'n' roll!" (Emphasis there's, not mine.) The scary part is that they somehow succeeded.

All Strapped Up is simply one of the most enjoyable rock albums I've heard in years. Which fits them perfectly into my new-found approach to honestly enjoying music. Not that I'm dropping the noisy, rough shit altogether--I'm listening to 2 by Hanatarash as I type--but it's nice to be able to fit one or two of these nice, wholesome albums in the rotation to lighten the mood on occasion.