rites of spring - end on end

Looking back on this post, I was somewhat considered with the flippant way I dismissed Rites of Spring's role in the history of emo.  They're considered the fathers of "emocore," but every time I listen to End on End, I'm struck by how similar they sound to every other decidedly non-emo mid-80's post-hardcore band I know.  Admittedly, however, it had been over a year since I last gave Rites of Spring a listen--certainly enough time for a change of heart--so I decided to revisit them and see if my opinion of these forefathers was still the same.

In short: it is.

Rites of Spring represented what amounts to a rather minor stylistic shift from hardcore punk, largely just melodic chords changes and personal lyrics.  A handful of distracters labeled their sound "emocore," and it was all downhill from there.

In hindsight, this makes absolutely no sense.  Guy Picciotto is no Dan Hoerner--his lyrics may pack an emotional punch, but his delivery here really isn't any different from his future Fugazi performances.  As for the musical changes, I can't help but personally find them a welcome, needed development of the mechanized nature of DC hardcore.  So too did Ian Mackaye himself, leading the vaunted Minor Threat frontman to from a band in the same vein, Embrace.

As dubious as its beginnings were, "emocore" eventually did succeed in becoming a true genre of its own--it simply happened eight years after Rites of Spring broke up.  These guys simply tweaked hardcore at a time when the DC scene was becoming increasingly stale and repetitive, and in response, the scene slandered them, tainting them perhaps forever as the founders of a weak, laughable derivative sound, instead of recognizing them as one of the better bands to ever come out of DC.

When we finally re-write the rock 'n roll history books, the emo chapter is gonna start with Sunny Day Real Estate.  Let Rites of Spring stay in the Dischord annals where they belong.

rubble 13: freak beat fantoms

I've never met a garage rock compilation I didn't like.  Which is pretty impressive, considering how many I've met at this point.

Nuggets, Back From the Grave, Pebbles, Where the Action Is!, Hallucinations, and now Rubble--hundreds of tracks, dozens of volumes, yet still barely scratching the surface of an almost comical amount of compilations in existence.  I keep waiting to be burnt out on them, waiting to reach that one volume too many that breaks my habit and forces me to acknowledge that most of these songs sound exactly the same.  I thought Rubble's twenty volumes would finally do me in, but here I am, thirteen volumes in, and still loving it.

So far, this compilation has been much less of a hit-or-miss than most others, especially Pebbles.  It undoubtedly helps that Rubble's volumes were released out of order, because whoa totally psychedelic or whatever.  Rubble 13 was released several years before Rubble 8, for example--a system that makes absolutely no sense, yet removes the bias that comes with listening to a volume deep in a series and assuming it's mainly leftovers.  There certainly has been a fair share of those leftovers, but nothing that tarnishes specific volumes by any means.

Unless the last few volumes take an unexpected dip in quality, this may go down as my favorite garage rock compilation of them all.  (So far.)  I'll go to war for Pebbles, and while it still may have better individual songs, Rubble is simply on another level as far as overall quality.  A fantastic comp that any garage/psychedelic fan needs to have in their collection.

tokyo police club - elephant shell

You'd be hard-pressed to find a publication more scrutinized than Pitchfork.

They made their name as self-professed tastemakers, praising and panning albums to ridiculous extremes, shaping the modern indie rock scene almost at will, wielding their absurdly overwrought reviews without an ounce of self-doubt or journalistic integrity.

As the company expanded, the absurd hyperbole that marked the majority of their early reviews ("I had never seen a shooting star before") was largely abandoned, their youthful exuberance replaced instead with the poised indifference of an aging kingmaker with nothing left to prove.  In a neat little "jumping the shark" moment, writer Sean Fennessey used the term "post-dubstep" in his 2010 review of Plastic Beach, only to have editors remove it from the article almost immediately.  The times had clearly changed.

Yet even as their reviews became more levelheaded and mature, Pitchfork's most defining and most toxic characteristic continued on, perhaps growing even worse over time: the "set 'em up, knock 'em down" hype cycle.

There is no better example of this process than Tokyo Police Club.

They emerged from a burgeoning Canadian indie rock scene in April 2006 with A Lesson in Crime, an EP of catchy synth-driven tunes that actually managed to break into the Canadian top 200.  Pitchfork gave it a 7.9 rating in August, noting in their review that Tokyo Police Club was already "blogger-approved," their four-month stint in the hype machine rendering them veterans of a world where a single show can make or break a rising act.

From there, the fuse was lit.  Those six brief songs circulated at astounding speeds, gathering so much attention that even dinosaurs like Rolling Stone took notice.  The "next-big-thing" label had been officially applied, and the music world waited anxiously for the mindblowing follow-up to their opening statement.

Of course, that mindblowing follow-up never came.  They released the decent-enough Smith EP in 2007, which fueled anticipation even further, while notably adding nothing to the formula of their debut.  Yet even with the increasing evidence that Tokyo Police Club was never going to advance beyond "Nature of the Experiment," the hype continued, the game-changing full-length lurking forever on the horizon.

By the time Elephant Shell was released in 2008, Tokyo Police Club were a bunch of has-beens.  Pitchfork had moved on to a new batch of indie darlings (Vampire Weekend! Fleet Foxes! Crystal Castles!) who were not only more interesting, but also objectively better.

After two long years, there was virtually nothing the band could do to fulfill the promises that had been lined up for them.  So, when their first LP turned out to be another batch of decent indie rock songs--which was all they had ever really made in the first place--they received a tame 6.3, banishing them to the well of middling artists that would continue to receive middling reviews as long as they put out middling records, a fate arguably worse than being panned outright.  (Their follow-up, Champ, actually received a 7.6, but don't be fooled: anything less than an 8 is still a noteless "meh.")

All things considered, Tokyo Police Club emerged from the belly of the beast more unscathed than most.  (When's the last time you've heard Tapes 'n Tapes mentioned by anyone?)  They're still putting out albums, they're still touring, and they've graduated to a level of popular recognition that even granted them an opening spot for indie-pop giants Foster the People.  They never met their media-assigned potential, but ultimately that's the real point of the hype machine: setting up impossible expectations, only to trash anything that falls short.  There's nothing particularly wrong with Elephant Shell, but thanks to the hype machine, it will forever be remembered for not being A Lesson in Crime, Part Two.