"And I ain't much to hear" - Shame, 'One Rizla'
"Lay off the fucking post-punk, all of you" - a friend reviewing 'This Nation's Saving Grace' by The Fall
I find the rehabilitation of Brutalism as an architectural form really strange. The current consensus seems to be that everyone is wrong to think massive brown buildings completely incongruous with the surrounding architecture are ugly - witness the invocation of Trump, the most famous idiot in the world, in this piece, for example - and that people simply don't understand how gorgeous they truly are. Brutalist buildings receive elegies on BBC Radio 3, the poshest channel, and we're subjected to headlines like To Some, Boston City Hall Is An Eyesore. To These Artists, It's Inspiration.
All of this completely misses the point, though. Brutalism is bad because Broadwater Farm erupted in rioting and Ronan Point erupted in flames, because Brasilia rapidly became an overpopulated dystopia, because Le Corbusier was self-admittedly trying to divide the ideal city in a Randian fashion such that the rich, important people lived in the middle where all the pretty stuff was and the disposable grunts lived on the outskirts. If I could I'd revive him, show him what's left of London, smile and say "Well done, love," and kill him again. It's fine to think Trellick Tower is pretty, but if you're just rocking up in a Slazenger trackie for "artistic inspiration" or "vibe" and then going home to somewhere that isn't crumbling under the weight of fifty years of underinvestment, your opinion shouldn't hold any weight. That the debate is even over the aesthetic merit of the building rather than their (lack of) functionality is of course yet another symptom of a culture of narcissism overly concerned with appearances and underly (?) concerned with what lies underneath.
Of course, none of this is the poor IDLES's fault. They're just some blokes from Bristol. But the two biggest problems with IDLES's Brutalism - their "preachiness" and the vapidity underneath it - are the exact same problems with people that love architectural brutalism.
Since we last visited the UK all the way back in 2010 it's probably wise to quickly go over what happened to British rock music in the interim. As expected, "guitar music" died a death following the last glut of bands at the end of the 2000s. The bands didn't flame out so much as slowly fade into the distance - The Maccabees never had some horrible breakup, they just wrote a sweet little goodbye, played some farewell tours, and stopped existing, for example. The key is that, as I've said before, none of the new bands not named "The 1975" stuck either. Remember Spector? Remember Miles Kane (by himself, not in the Last Shadow Puppets)? Remember the B-Town bands? Neither does anyone else. Even the NME, the only place bands like them used to be lauded, switched allegiances; at the 2012 NME Awards, the Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian led the nominations, and in 2017, it was Beyoncé. By the time we get to 2016 and 2017, the best selling albums in the genre are all by legacy acts - unfortunately the British rock charts don't seem to tally the end of year results but in America it was Coldplay, Radiohead, David Bowie and the Rolling fucking Stones flying the Union Jack those years. The Rolling Stones.
Okay, you know I did that stupid bit about Trellick Tower? Not only are the members of the Rolling Stones older than that historic, Grade II* listed building - not only is the band itself older than that building - the band had already released their ninth album and begun their critical downslide by the time it was built. That's who was leading the charge for British bands commercially. A band on its forty-fifth year of receiving the backhanded compliment "Their Best Since Exile!" for each new album. Jesus wept.
Of course that's not the only thing that matters. As I've made clear, I wasn't listening or paying attention to much current music in the mid-2010s but the style that arose while I was gone is clear. Call it post-punk-revival-revival, call it post-Brewdog's-Punk-IPA, call it 6Music-core, call it "blatantly ripping off the Fall", there were a great many bands with very loud guitars and very loud shouty singers, and they haven't stopped coming. This was the artistic milieu into which IDLES launched themselves, basically fully formed, in 2017.
You can probably tell that I fucking hate this style of music. It's not its fault, I'm just not built for it. I don't like the Sex Pistols or the Stooges or the Fall or any number of bands that influenced this current crop that also includes 6Music mainstays like London's Shame, Dublin's Fontaines D.C., and Detroit's Protomartyr, and so many more. There's a new one every season, this spring it's Dry Cleaning, in winter it was Black Country, New Road, etc. I don't have anything much to say about IDLES themselves, especially because I have friendships hanging by a thread because I won't shut up about how much I dislike them. Just know I think they're stupid. Instead, I'm gonna try and look at Why All British Music Sounds Like This Right Now. Why has there been a five year plus deluge of this kind of band? When will we be free? Let's see.
Possible culprit #1: Politics
I don't buy this one but it's the main media narrative around these bands, c.f. "The Post-Brexit New Wave" in NPR. Bands like IDLES have taken a ferociously leftist stance as part of their brand. Thus, the reason these bands are so popular is they offer effective resistance to the brutal regime of the Conservative government in the United Kingdom.
Two reasons I think that's bull. Firstly, the Tories have been in power for eleven years and the indiesphere hasn't sounded like this the whole time. In 2011, at the peak of Coalition fuckeries - the student loan increases, the London riots, the drastic public service cuts in the name of austerity - indie music sounded like "Shuffle" by Bombay Bicycle Club or "Pelican" by the Maccabees. Big, technicolour pop that screams "I have just been given access to a studio and BY GOD I'm going to milk it." Not a political pronouncement in sight, just people living in the moment. You can argue that for some reason bands needed five or six years before they got mad about the Tories, or that it was actually Brexit, or some other wank, but time wise shit ain't addin' up.
Second reason is these bands don't REALLY address anything political in anything more than the most superficial ways. IDLES, theoretical kings of this realm, often fall hilariously short of the mark. Listen to something like "Well Done" from Brutalism. Wikipedia says the song looks at "class war". Uh-huh. Swear down. The conceit is each verse goes "Why don't you [thing]? Even Tarquin [thing]! Even Mary Berry [thing]! So why don't you [thing]?" I know it seems like I've ruined the joke or neutralised its venom by writing it out like that but I promise I haven't. This is not "looking at class war", it's just using a posh person's name, and a celebrity that was popular in 2017. I'm all for dated references, look at the state of the blog, man, but there's no actual reason they picked Mary Berry other than 2017 was, like, Peak Bake Off. "They're skewering the British public's obsession with upper class television figures, douchebag." They're fuckwits, babe. In the last verse they swap Mary Berry for Trevor Nelson, which cadet branch of the Plantagenets is he from again? Lancaster, York, or The House Of Wog? Oh, you mean the Oyster Bay Nelsons, not the Hyde Park Nelsons, I'm with you now. If this is the kind of cogent political analysis that's supposed to rend the shackles of conservatism and deliver us to a Marxist utopia I may as well start lubing up my arsehole now because we are all about to get FUCKED.
"Mary Berry! Trevor Nelson! Those people exist!"
This is why it's so funny they named the album Brutalism. Brutalism as an architectural movement was comprised of structures built with no subtlety, massive fucking slabs of unadorned concrete jutting out into the sky hither and thither basically "because we can", all as part of an extremely capitalist plot, that's now lionised by out-of-touch middle class kids to piss off their daddies. And Brutalism as an album, well, you fill in the blanks...
Point is, the political angle is not the reason for the Great Flood Of Mediocre Post Punk. Our situation is not comparable to, say, America, where 2017 marked a transition between (what a lot of people considered) their most progressive administration and (what a lot of people considered) their least. Pretty much every American release in 2017 was thought of, both by the artists and the critics, through the prism of Trump, whether it was truly related or not. 2017 for us was just Year Seven of hell.
Possible culprit #2 - the changing whims of the record-buying (streaming) public
I also don't believe this, but let me at least explain it first.
Britain has a rich, sixty-year tradition of "guitar pop". When you hear era-specific terms like 'Merseybeat', 'Britpop', etc, it can obscure the fact that you can draw a pretty solid line from the Shadows through the early Beatles/Stones/Kinks through glam rock through the Jam through the Smiths through the Stone Roses through Oasis through the Libertines. They're all just doing roughly the same shit - catchy pop songs with guitars in. Sure, the Shadows did instrumentals when they weren't backing Cliff; Morrissey referenced Keats and Yeats and pronounced them correctly (i.e. they don't rhyme); the Gallagher brothers were idiots. Everyone put their own spin on it. You'll note, though, that I stopped at the Libertines - since their untimely, NME-fueled demise there's only one band that's wrested the throne of "UK Guitar Pop Band" from them - the Arctic Monkeys. Otherwise, no one's even come close. Granted, a lot of them aren't trying, but what attempts there have been have been utterly woeful, culminating in the sad, sad story of Viva Brother.
"Who?" Here's the 4-1-1, folks: emo kids from Slough (Americans, imagine Cleveland or somewhere similarly nondescript and depressing - if you've seen the English Office, that's Slough) get makeovers to fit in with that lineage I described, and start mouthing off to the press circa 2011. "It's time for a proper band with some bollocks," "We've written the best songs of the past twenty years", that sort of bullshit. The album arrives and is uniformly panned by pretty much every publication. "Clichéd"; "tragicomic"; "disappointing"; "infant grade lyrics"; "[might be] the most uninspired, downright awful British album of the year". Also, they had to change their name from Brother to Viva Brother because there was an Australian band that fuse digeridoo with bagpipes called Brother that were threatening to lawyer up. Truly some of the most embarrassing shit ever seen.
Or, to be more recent, remember Sports Team? If shit hadn't locked down I think they had the potential to embarrass themselves at a Viva Brother level. As it is, singer Alex Rice dunked the band in hot water by essentially calling HMLTD overeducated poofters and Fontaines DC pretentious arseholes - while in the same article it is explained five sixths of the band met at the University of Cambridge and Rice admitted to "channeling Betjeman" when lyric writing. Debut Deep Down Happy came out last June, and it's fine. Solid. Problem with chattin wham on the scale of a Sports Team or Viva Brother is you really, really need the songs to back it up. Solid really doesn't cut it. Again, Noel Gallagher is a Neanderthal and a Tory, but he wrote "Live Forever" and "Don't Look Back In Anger" so to be perfectly honest, he can say whatever the fuck he wants. If your band talks about delivering rock music from the Shames and Sorrys and IDLESs of the current scene, but then just delivers an alright rock album, you've completely snaked yourself on numerous fronts, and what would otherwise be a 'good start' becomes a disappointment. Sad! Fifteen years of such cases!
Point is, witnessing those failures in conjunction with the rise of post-punk IPA one could very easily conclude that the British public are simply sick of big pop songs with big guitar chords, but, again, I think that fails on at least two levels as well. Firstly, it's not like these guys are cribbing from anything more current than Oasis - the Fall are forty years old, the Stooges fifty. I haven't listened to Schlagenheim by black midi since it came out but at the time I remember being convinced they were a Drive Like Jehu ripoff - a thirty year old post-hardcore band. Black Country, New Road, on the other hand, incorporate all sorts of offbeat influences but at the end of the day when singer Isaac Wood facetiously calls them "the world's second best Slint cover band" on 'Science Fair' he is only sort of joking. I don't think people are abandoning the old sounds of the Stone Roses or the Jam only to go gaga over the old sounds of Drive Like Jehu and Slint, though of course "Here Come The Rome Plows" is probably heard less frequently at indie discos than "Waterfall" and is thus less worn out.
Periodical reminder that Boris invented COVID because Sheffield United were gonna get into Europe and Sam Fender was gonna lead the subsequent northern revolt against the Tories https://t.co/QIyK1vQzyV
— the leafs are who we thought they were (@volvicstorm98) May 31, 2021
Secondly, artists who veer closer to that Great British Guitar Music lane have fared pretty damn well. Manchester band the Courteeners - and I don't just mean they're from Middleton, I mean they are the platonic ideal of A Manchester Band - have been selling out massive gigs in Manchester for ten years at this point. Sam Fender was doing similar up in Newcastle before the government invented coronavirus to stop him, and Gerry Cinnamon the same in Scotland. Cinnamon seems like an outlier because he's just a bloke with an acoustic guitar but to draw upon the lineage again - "That's Entertainment" by the Jam, "She's Electric" by Oasis, all number of Beatles songs, they're all the kind of thing that would go down amazingly well at a little open mic in a British pub, and I know this because I have absolutely KILLED with "I'm Only Sleeping" before. Great British Guitar Music is alive and well, it's just not being covered in the same way. Be honest, did you know the Courteeners sold out Heaton Park in 2018? Did you know the Courteeners were even still going before you read this? It's okay, darling, me neither. NME lied to the both of us. And no, the Courteeners don't sound much like Sam Fender, who doesn't sound much like Gerry Cinnamon, but they're all swinging for the fences in a similar way.
IDLES et al haven't adopted their sound as a cash/fame grab, have they. It's not like they're making shitloads of money playing bad post-punk. Nor have they done so out of a burning desire to shape the political future of the country. So what the fuck's going on, then?
Possible reason #3: these artists are genuinely expressing themselves, their fans are genuinely enjoying themselves, and I need to grow up
Booooooooo. Take your logic and fuck off. Little sket.
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| gotta add it somewhere |
Possible reason #4: protracted landfill indie hangover
This is some dense genre nonsense, so bear with me. If you're not aware, the group of mediocre British guitar bands that cropped up in the second half of the 2000s were christened 'landfill indie'. For more info check out this VICE article. By 2011 or so, this music was firmly Deader Than Disco from a critical perspective, though some bands would remain popular with their audience - Courteeners being a perfect example. The widespread acceptance and spreading of the term "landfill indie", as funny and, let's be honest, accurate as it is, though, obscures something - when I were a lad, we called that stuff post-punk revival.
Post-punk, I should probably explain, was all the weird shit that bands made following the original punk explosion of 1977. It took varying forms, and is thus quite hard to pin down as a sound. It sounds pretentious as hell, but it really was more of an ethos, maaaaaan. Anything from Television's jangly guitars and Impressionistic lyrics, to A Certain Ratio's disco/funk experiments, to Public Image Ltd's obsession with dub and noise, to XTC's herky-jerky pop songs, to The Cure and the Banshees inventing goth music in the corner, it was all fair game. The key was, they were taking the DIY attitude of punk and applying it to styles other than regular old rock music.
What was being "revived" in the mid-2000s, then, was up for debate. Franz Ferdinand wanted to be literate and funky like their fellow Scots Orange Juice and Josef K; Bloc Party wanted to Sound Big, and Mean Something, like early U2 (Russell Lissack definitely uses as many guitar effects as the Edge); Arctic Monkeys were channeling the pubbier, wordier side of things like Elvis Costello, the Jam, and even bits of the Specials. And then the landfill indie bands were all aping Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, and the Arctic Monkeys, along with the Libertines and Oasis and everyone else in the Great British Guitar Pop Lineage I was talking about. By the time you get to the bands in the VICE article I linked, your Little Men Tate, your Joe Leans and their Jing Jang Jongs, etc, you're dealing with copies of copies of copies, Carlsberg-stained palimpsest, something something Baudrillard, and it's no wonder people were scrambling for something, anything else to listen to, as we discussed back in 2010.
People call the current wave of Shame, Squid, IDLES, etc, "post-punk revival" as well, but no one would mistake them for the Pigeon Detectives - the Pigeon Detectives are fun. No, seriously, they're obviously wildly different styles. What gives? "Genres are fake!" No. I'm not doing this now, bro. "You know I'm right!" I just think people are using the wrong descriptors - most this is all distressingly straight-ahead punk. We all talk about the Fall and Gang of Four and people when we talk about these bands but at the end of the day half these bands are shouting over pretty simple powerchords. Gang Of Four punctuate their (far more well thought out than the modern lot) political musings with guitar stabs that sound like Wilko Johnson and Nile Rodgers having a scrap, and as much as I hate the Fall they're anything but orthodox musically. There's a few bands, squid and black midi for example, that read as 'experimental' or 'post-rock' but at the end of the day, if I told you there was a band called Chocolate Digestive from Walworth and you should go listen to their amazing new single "Harriet Harman" you can probably guess exactly how that would sound.
As I prepare to post this I've just been made aware of something that makes this difference abundantly clear - IDLES covering Gang Of Four. Listen to the original, and then their cover - they're both in the playlist up top - and hear how much funkier the guitar is, how much more complex the bassline is, how much more restrained the singer is. Go4 completely body IDLES, completely, and it's almost painful to see. This is post-punk cosplay, except cosplayers tend to work hard on their costumes.
Anyway, what's coalesced in the past few years is diametrically opposed to the landfill indie of the late 2000s, and my point with this section is that's on purpose. Landfill indie bands were from (no offence) deeply unfashionable towns like Northampton, Bexhill-on-Sea, and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the current scene is centred on the trendiest parts of the Lowland South. Landfill indie was clumsy at best with regard to relationships with women, and there weren't really any female-fronted bands, at least none I can think of; IDLES sing about enthusiastic consent and Goat Girl and Sorry and Shopping and Big Joanie etc, etc, are front and centre in the scene. The Rifles formed after an Oasis concert, named themselves after a The Jam song (I assume), and then sang about a war veteran and named their second album Great Escape. They were firmly English and firmly placing themselves in the lineage. Fontaines DC made a stir around the time they released their first album Dogrel by saying "before [noise rock band Girl Band] the only way to be an Irish band was to be all diddly-diddly-aye". You can guarantee Black Country, New Road would roll their eyes if you ever cited Led Zeppelin or Status Quo or any British other band that people actually like. Not only are these groups musical opposites, they are opposites morally, culturally, geographically, and any other adverb you want to throw in. It's a souped up version of the old Blur vs Oasis battle, with a dash of post-Brexit revulsion toward one another form both sides - are you with the snarky, literate, experimental Londoners, or the heart-on-sleeve, good-time, fun Northerners? - except there's no Oasis and dozens of Blurs.
I think we're getting closer to the reason these bands, but there's one more frankly unpalatable reason I'd like to go through before I conclude.
Possible reason #5: no blacks
"Despite appearances, I haven't got the voice for R&B" sings (the presumably Afro-Caribbean) Lily Fontaine of English Teacher on, well, 'R&B', and I think hearing this song part-way through writing this brought it all together. As much as it pains me to say it, I think the Pitchfork-NPR-New York Times-types might be right when they say indie is unbearably white.
Hear me out, I don't think this is going where you assume it's going. Thing is, those British Guitar Pop bands tend to be relatively prominently influenced by people of African descent, whether from the US or Jamaica or wherever else. The Beatles made a name for themselves by covering the Isley Brothers and Barrett Strong. Marc Bolan just wanted to be Chuck Berry. The Clash loved reggae as much as punk. Paul Weller loved R&B so much he broke up the Jam to form a soul band. Even the Arctic Monkeys wanted AM to sound like 50 Cent, and covered Drake around that time.
You will find no such influence in the post-punk-IPA bands. They tend not to crib to influences older than the aforementioned Girl Band and Protomartyr anyway, but the days of the xx adoring Aaliyah and James Blake making gospel-dubstep are firmly in the rearview of what's popular in British indie. But that's the thing. They're not just ignoring "black" music, they're ignoring pretty much everything outside of their bubble.
That's not necessarily a bad thing - like I've said before, "white" as code for "culturally irrelevant" is a ridiculous way to think - but I think, like picking Brutalism as an album title, it's accidentally indicative of the outlook this kind of music. I'm sure all these bands, as facilely political as they are, participated in all the BLM wank last year, and yet, I can't think of anyone bar Ms Fontaine that's black in this kind of scene, and that's a real fucking achievement for something centred around Brixton. Oh, the drummer in black midi, too. He's a beast, by the way. That's also how you know them man are actually from South London rather than transplants from Reigate or Datchet or some such insufferable place. It's just very funny that a scene that thinks itself so different to the white male landfill indie bands of yesteryear is also overwhelmingly white and male, and doesn't even have the excuse of being from Northampton or Bexhill or whatever. I'm not about to pretend that youngers in the (brutalist, and fucked) Aylesbury would be bumping Dry Cleaning along with Loski and Backroad Gee if only they had a black bassist, but the key is they've also lost the white kids as well.
I think the media are intent on making this The Thing this year, not just an underground Scene That Celebrates Itself, but the actual Sound of Post-Brexit, Disaffected British Youth, and they haven't got a hope in hell. That sound is actually UK drill, and roadmen from the Aylesbury and posh kids from Aylesbury will agree on that. Alex Rice from Sports Team claims his band, with their talk of motorways and Wetherspoonses, are the true sound of places like Aylesbury, Royal Tunbridge Wells, and that, but I guarantee you could get way more of those kids to belt out every word of "Thiago Silva" Alex-style than any music involving a guitar.
Point is, this insularity can't run. "Ghost Town" by the Specials worked, fuck, still works, as The Sound Of Britain because it was a mixed band talking about what a shithole their hometown is. Literally every kid in the country can relate to that. This talky-post-punk stuff is, in contrast, very, very insular - small geographical spread, few bands that all hang with each other, no interest in, even a disdain for, being part of a bigger musical conversation or older lineage - so if it gets the more mainstream push I'm expecting, I don't really foresee a backlash. I just see massive disengagement and apathy. Maybe a backlash against the music press for being so into this bollocks, but nothing against the bands themselves; they're doing their thing and they seem to be enjoying it (see part #3). But if something is quite clearly Not For You, nor interested in being For You, there's no way it'll cross over. If you were intent on getting British kids to never pick up a guitar again, telling them IDLES are the future is perhaps the most efficient way you could do it. The problem isn't "no blacks", it's no ANYONE outside of a very select group.
Conclusion - what's the deal with these bands, man?
Okay, let's finish up here. These bands are political, a reaction to Brexit, but not in the way NPR - or they - think. Like all art, they are reflections of cultural and political trends, not drivers. By the mid-2010s, small towns across were no longer producing what they had done before the recession, and as such, the media intently focused on the whims of a relatively small group of people in the richest city in the UK that defined themselves in complete opposition to the people of those small towns. That's Brexit, and that's the post-punk-IPA bands. What you cannot ignore is that the alternatives were genuinely shite. I would like to live in a world where Brexit went swimmingly and globalisation stopped existing and Burnley mattered again, but we don't. I most certainly don't want to live in a world where Viva Brother and Spector were the ones that crossed over at the expense of Black Country, New Road. These bands receive the media push because there is pretty much nothing else of consequence to cover, Sam Fender notwithstanding, and then shitloads of these bands form because that's what gets coverage. The end result, to my mind, will be the musical equivalent of the 2019 General Election, where Labour had to reckon with the fact that everyone fucking hates them in unbelievably brutal fashion. Let's just say I won't want to see the review for BC,NR's, or Dry Cleaning's, or Squid's second albums. The whims of hipsters are fickle, and once this stuff has run its course you'll get some kind of visceral reaction, a Mannerism to the Renaissance, a Romanticism to Classicism, a Wiley to Craig David, and everyone will pretend they never even liked Sorry or ...Feet? FEET? Jesus Christ, blud - in the first place. It's a real Shame.
It's all very simple. "Have you noticed I've never been impressed by your friends from New York and London?" asked the Cribs (of Wakefield). "No", replied the Guardian and the Line Of Best Fit and Stereogum. They will pay the price. Lay off the fucking post-punk, all of you.
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