letter from NYC - outlook for '93: grim

LETTER FROM NYC: outlook for '93: grim
Melody Maker, December 1992

by Simon Reynolds

     Since it's that time of year when everyone's looking to the

future, let me weigh in with my two cents worth: not predictions, so

much as patterns for '93 in American rock.  This much is obvious:

the major labels are still fixated on that delusory figment, "the

next Nirvana".  Having signed most of Nirvana's grunge peers, and

scraped the bottom of that barrel, they're currently harvesting the

next crop: bands whose development has been (mis)shaped

by the success of "Nevermind".

   So if you thought the first, "authentic" wave was dire enough,

gird thy lug-holes for the likes of Kyuss, Stone Temple Pilots, and

Wool.  These neo-grungers occupy a constricted triangle of terrain

whose points are Black Sabbath, Black Flag, and Helmet.  Their

vocalists all bellow in that godawful Soundgarden/Alice In Chains

pseudo-blues style, like Joe Cocker being crushed between two slabs

of conrete.  Kyuss' "Blues For The Red Sun" LP, for instance, is

a dismal slog of down-tuned guitars and sluggish tempos.  The video

for the single "Thong Song" is set in some kind of sallow-lit

dungeon, while the song itself oscillates between a stop-start,

crippled riff and ineffectual blasts of rage, like a prisoner in

solitary trying to escape by using his head as a battering ram.

     If Kyuss are singing the modern blues, as the LP title seems to

claim, this is the blues as sung by Ozzy Osbourne and filtered

through Henry Rollins.  Rollins' agonised throes of failed, flailing

masculinity, as first and best heard on Black Flag's "Damaged", were

a seminal influence on Nirvana.  And Rollins' recent song "Low Self

Esteem" captures the (dis)spirit of grunge perfectly.  Musclebound

but impotent, grunge is masculine, but never macho in a flamboyant

Jagger/Plant/Axl way.  Grunge isn't the new cock rock, it's the

castration blues.

    And so bands like Kyuss don't swagger, they strain: their

riffage sounds strenuous, like it's perpetually on the verge of

sprouting a hernia. In a recent issue of Details, Rollins writes

eloquently about his almost mystical attitude to working out. He

sees "The Iron" as his only true friend: submitting to its regime,

he learns to channel his aggression and confront his own limits.

Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Rollins is a survivalist, a One

Man Army, at war with himself.  If Rollins is parted from his

weights for any prolonged period, he sinks into a morass of

despondency, like a career soldier who's been demobilised against

his will.  With Rollins, Kyuss, et al, rock is a kind of spiritual

work-out, a fortification of the self in order to face the minefield

of everyday life.

    There's another strain of US rock activity, bands who don't

fight abjection but succumb to it: Come, Swell, Codeine, Toiling

Midgets, and other inhabitants of the abyss.  Where the turgid toil

of Rollins-rock is eventually numbing, this music is plain numb:

Come should really call themselves Coma. Again, "the blues" are

waved around by some as a reference point, but I can't hear it,

except in so far as this music is black-and-blue with emotional

bruises, blue like the rigor mortis of an overdose victim.

     If there's a gleam of brightness on the bleak horizon of US

rock, it takes the form not of positivity but peculiarity: the

absurdist rock of lo-fi art-punks like Royal Trux, Thinking Fellers

Union Local 282, Cul de Sac, Sun City Girls, Fantastic Palace, Wall

Drug, and others.  Operating somewhere to the left of Pavement and

Mercury Rev, these bands are heavily influenced by the warped and

wired fractures of The Fall, the fissile soundscapes of Faust and

Can, and Sonic Youth's oldstyle guitar-reinvention. Although they

have a similar experimental approach to the British avant-rock

fringe (Moonshake, Earwig, Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, Papa

Sprain etc), the US weirdos are still somewhat restricted by their

guitar-fetishism.  US rock has yet to embrace the psychedelic

possibilites of sampling: it still thinks disco sucks.  The two

Brit-rock pinnacles of the Nineties-Primal Scream's "Higher Than The

Sun" and MBV's "To Here Knows When"-could never have happened

without rave culture.  But even with their lo-fi Luddite tendencies,

these art-punks know how to marvel, rather than wallow in the mire

of moroseness.



[footnote: now i would much rather listen to the mire-of-morose bands of that era - Alice of Chains above all, but probably Kyuss and possibly even Wool whoever the fuck they were - than any of them lo-fi record-clerk collector/zine-ed type bands]