Bring the Noise

Crause sees Disco Inferno as a ‘virtual reality band’. But what’s really interesting about them is the way they haven’t totally abandoned the rock process: they combine the physicality of live performance with the wizardry of sampling. (Crause claims that DI Go Pop was recorded live, and that the group’s future plans include using Marshall amps!)

desire to create a ‘fictional psycho-acoustic space’

Post-rock means using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and powerchords.

Perhaps the only term open-ended yet precise enough to cover all this activity is ‘post-rock’.

For the post-rock groups, Sonic Youth’s idea of ‘reinventing the guitar’ really means un-rocking the guitar; sometimes the next step is ditching the guitar altogether. Disco Inferno’s Iain Crause says he always wanted to make his guitar sound like ‘actual physical things’, such as waterfalls, but in DI’s early days (when the group sounded closer to Joy Division and The Durutti Column) he had to do it with masses of effects.

And there’s none more rigorous than Joe Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Carducci may be a bit of a reactionary, but his theory of rock is grounded in a precise, materialist definition of it as music, rather than ‘attitude’, ‘spirit’, ‘rebellion’, or any other metaphysical notions. Rock’s essence, says Carducci, is the real-time interaction of drums, bass and rhythm guitar. A group should be a rhythmic engine creating kinetic energy; ‘breathing’ as an organic entity.

Like a clapped-out stretch limo cranked in reverse, today’s ‘alternative rock’ is synonymous with a retreat to one of a number of period genres from rock history. For Primal Scream think Exile on Main Street-era Stones. For Suede think Ziggy-phase Bowie. In 1994, just six short years from a new millennium, this is where the money is at: in the musical equivalent of reproduction antiques.

Even after Bill Clinton’s victory, things look bleak for American youth. Paying off the deficit will depress the US economy for years. So you can expect to hear US bands singing the ‘born to lose’ blues for a long time to come.

As one real-life teenager in the book says, ‘no job is worth cutting your hair for’.

All year, the US alternative scene has been dominated by bands who take their cues from the early seventies, when groups like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Mountain, etc. bastardized and brutalized the blues.