On The Brand New Heavies

I used to argue with a friend about genre a lot in that music-focused book-club-style thing I mention from time to time. He'd be like "insistence upon genre as a system is a needlessly reductive way of looking at art that boxes in all those who subscribe to it", and I'd be all like "genre is a necessary and useful method of delineating between stylistic approaches and collecting like-minded people together", and he'd be all like "why are you being so fucking closed-minded, you stupid cunt, I hate you so much", and I'd be like "fam I will literally end your shit right now, I've killed before and I will kill again", and then my lawyer says I can't continue this run-on sentence, but, as is probably clear, we were arguing at cross purposes. He was looking at this from the perspective of an artist, whereas I was looking at it from the perspective of a consumer.

The utility of a genre descriptor for a music fan is one of legibility; firstly, to save yourself countless conversations along the lines of the "can you play the one that 'goes bee boo boo bop'?" conversation from SpongeBob or the beginning of this Lily Allen video you can simply tell the cashier or DJ or, assuming it's the present and not fucking 1986, your streaming service "I would like some 'electro' or some 'jungle'", et cetera. Plenty of genres build up subcultures surrounding the music too, so the term becomes less a pure descriptor of sound (this is acid house 'cause someone made it with a 303 and an 808) and more a rallying point around which you experience the totality of life (this is acid house 'cause it was playing at the Hacienda while I was off my gourd on Es with my mates and I got off with are Linda for the first time). Collectors and music nerds like myself benefit from the ability to dig deeper and explore bands that one might not otherwise find using these tags; hearing Sloan for the first time is all well and good, but knowing there's an entire genre called "power pop" that consists entirely of bands that ALSO sound like the Beatles circa 1965 is nothing short of a miracle.

This is the basis on which I defend genre normally, but there's a nice modern case study of a 'sound' with no genre label that, in my opinion, really could've benefitted from one, even from the perspective of the artists making the music. This is how I would tell the tale of the Brand New Heavies. No, not them.

Basically, there's a been a bunch of bands from the past decade that all sound similar to each other, but no single descriptor has coalesced around them, and I think the words people HAVE used have done the groups a disservice. Look at them like this: they're far too woozy and ethereal to be regular down-home rock, but far too earthen and grounded to be space rock. There's traces of emo, but not nearly enough anguished bloodletting for that, and they're far too well-defined and sharp to be (blurry, unclear) shoegaze or slowcore. There is nu-metal influence - almost entirely from Deftones - but it's not that either. People try and use for grunge for this style a lot but there's not nearly enough classic rock worship involved for that, all these reference points are firmly post-Revolution Summer. They're not quite heavy enough to be any subgenre of metal but would feel similarly out of place sharing a bill with a bunch of twee indie-pop bands. My semi-serious suggestion: the Brand New Heavies.

Where'd this shit come from and who's doing it? Here's the 411: in the 90s there were a lot of bands - Hum, Failure, Smashing Pumpkins, Swervedriver - that split the difference between the grunge coming out of Seattle and the shoegaze coming out of the Thames Valley (or Kevin Shields' brain). In the post-emo landscape of the mid-2010s a lot of bands, often but not always from the Rust Belt, emerged that carried this torch while melding it with the DIY hardcore scenes they'd emerged from, and a shitload of that aforementioned Deftones worship for good measure. Thus, you first see the Pennsylvania lot that were a real catalyst for this style: Nothing, Title Fight, Tigers Jaw, Balance and Composure, Little Big League (project of future NYT bestseller Michelle Zauner, or Japanese Breakfast). Cloakroom out of Indiana, formed from the ashes of emo revival band Grown Ups. Ovlov from Connecticut. Basement from Suffolk. Greet Death from Michigan. Whirr (formerly Whirl) out of NorCal even though you shouldn't talk about them. Narrow Head from Texas. Fleshwater, side project of hardcore band vein.fm, and Adventures, side project of hardcore band Code Orange. Loathe, of Liverpool, are a metalcore band really but they go this way sometimes. This is a legit THING and has been for a while. Check out the playlist, I think they're all pretty good! So, part two: why no name?

Artists don't tend to coin genres, unless they're doing a prank. Pete Townshend is kind of the only example where he meant it sincerely and it was then utilised by other people. Quoth the nonce: "Power pop is what we play—what the Small Faces used to play, and the kind of pop the Beach Boys played in the days of 'Fun, Fun, Fun' which I preferred." Most artists either go the route of "we just make MUSIC, man", disavowing the concept entirely, or they do something like Esham, a Detroit rapper who called his gruesome, heady, disorienting music "acid rap", only for no one else to ever call it that (we call it horrorcore now but I don't really think that term had been invented in the late 80s). A third, particularly unfortunate route, increasingly common in the new millenium, is for an artist to say some stupid shit in an interview or whatever and for it to become a genre tag anyway, much to everyone's horror. Seapunk, for example, one of the earliest social-media-specific genres, was coined in a tweet and over the course of the next twelve months made its way into the vernacular via performances by Azealia Banks and Rihanna on late night TV. (Seapunk was always more of a visual aesthetic than a musical sound, but that's part of my point. Sometimes genres combine things you wouldn't otherwise see as connected - like kitschy American beach culture and music Tumblr likes, I guess? - and make you see shit differently!)

(This isn't related to anything that's supposed to be in this blog, but like: I was trying to read this article about glitchcore from just a couple years ago, because I was curious as to who coined the hyperpop-esque terms floating around [verdict: 'hyperpop' is actually a relatively old term, from the 90s at least, and has simply been repurposed by Spotify], and it's amazing how many of the links are already dead! When I were a lad we were scaremongered into thinking things on the internet would last forever but I think we have now all realised that since social media became the main - sometimes only - way we interact with the Internet, that means everything can and will disappear at the whims of Elon or the other dipshit CEOs like him. Not to mention what probably happened here - literal teenagers posting shit that they probably no longer vibe with for whatever reason. Can't begrudge them that. Everything not saved WILL be lost - for better and for worse.)

Fans SOMETIMES coin genres. It's not too common, and I now can't think of one, but it does happen, I promise. However, it's almost always music writers, commentators, and other losers like me that coin genre terms that stick. The reasoning is obvious: they're the ones with "authority" when it comes to thinking about music, and they're the ones whose writing will eventually act as the go-to way to understand a scene or musical moment. I think this feeling that some outside arbitrator who's never drank a Duff played an instrument in his life that gets to decide how stuff fits together, how people will remember you, is at least part of what tends to turn artists off the concept of genre altogether.

So why didn't it happen for my loudbois? At least part of the issue is music writers are less important and respected than they have ever been: we're past the Rolling Stone/CREEM era where they were at the forefront of the conversation in American culture, and the honestly kinda gross era where British music magazines were essentially tabloids rife with gossip columns and hearsay (Miki Berenyi is a drunkard? Damon shagged Liam's bird? Girls Aloud are all whores?) and very little music, has also long since been and gone. Blogs and dedicated review sites still exist - not me, good ones, consistent ones - but nor are we in the era where a band like Black Kids or Tapes 'n' Tapes could be thrust into the relative limelight with one or two positive posts. If I, or someone else, had given these bands any sort of name in a nationwide/worldwide publication, even one as shitty as the "brand new heavies", it might've stuck - it's just very unlikely that anyone else would've seen. Like, someone else probably HAS thought of a sick name for them, it's just on one blog somewhere that hasn't updated since 2017 and hasn't posted on social media since the pandemic because the writer bought a modular synth and started making minimal techno or something. The ecosystem isn't there anymore.

A second issue is "alternative rock" doesn't really exist anymore. I'm probably gonna write an entire separate thing about that, so no real expansion here, but just know that a) this is how Hum, Smashing Pumpkins, et al would've been described in the 90s, b) no one uses the term anymore, and c) if they did it wouldn't really be sufficient anyway. It ended up not being so for those original bands and there's no reason it would go differently a second time.

The third thing is that the music writers that DO exist don't really do things like "coin genre terms" willy-nilly anymore. In the nineties, Melody Maker had the REACH to try and pretend like a bunch of club kids wearing some make-up and holding guitars was Romo, The Future Of British Music, sure. They also had the belief that this was a good and proper thing to do. The problem with doing that so liberally and so frequently is these phrases tend to age incredibly poorly and, as my good friend would argue, box in unrelated artists in unhelpful ways. I'm thinking about PBR&B here, a pithy term created by writer Eric Harvey as a joke, that then became seen as an unhelpful albatross around the necks of the mostly black artists saddled with it. Harvey went as far as to write this article where he explains how bad he feels for ever thinking of "PBR&B", even in jest. That's all well and good. Thing is, I think it's a fucking sick genre term. 

For those who have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, PBR&B describes a sort of music that became very common in the early 2010s, a dark, sparse, and often more lo-fi take on R&B that stood in contrast to the clubbier, poppier things going on in the charts back then. Consider the difference between "Thinkin' Bout You" by Frank Ocean or "Teen Spirit" by SZA, and something like "OMG" by Usher, who is nominally R&B as well. PBR stands for Pabst Blue Ribbon, a dreadful beer that became popular with hipsters semi-ironically because it was cheap and signalled working-class taste. The combination, then, clearly means "R&B for hipsters, R&B that sounds nothing like what's going in the mainstream". That everyone took this to mean "R&B that white people like" is a massive shame first of all, and also wrong.

Wikipedia now calls it "alternative R&B", and here we run into the exact same problem people faced calling Smashing Pumpkins "alternative rock" circa 1995: alternative to what? Something you might notice is a lot of these artists described as PBR&B at the time - Frank, SZA, Miguel, and especially the Weeknd - are fucking massive now! The Weeknd is literally the most streamed artist on a month-by-month basis of all time or some shit! What is this an alternative to? Of course, Abel and co aren't exactly in their 'sampling Cocteau Twins and living a debauched libertine existence in Queen West' era anymore, but that's just as much a result of the mainstream bending towards his sound than the reverse. It arguably starts as early as "Marvin's Room", but as I have already written about, this dour, hazy, hipster-ish sound completely took over popular music in the 2010s, making stars out of the aforementioned folx, folding left-field influences like the xx and James Blake and XXYYXX into the R&B conversation, making converts out of people like Beyoncé ("Drunk In Love", that whole era where her and Shawn listened to Dirty Projectors and Coldplay and shit), and making poppy R&B pretty much completely disappear until, I'd suggest, now.

PBR&B as a term, then, is simultaneously kinda funny - even if artists the joke is on them, it's just a bit of gentle ribbing, and it's as much on us as consumers - memorable, and actually a clearer, better defined term than anything neutral like "alternative" or "indie" R&B. This is the platonic ideal of a genre descriptor! But that's not what writers do anymore. As a general aside, we have to find a middleground between the absolutely heinous behaviour of any English music publication before 2010 and the incredibly boring behaviour of online music publications SINCE 2010. I don't mean "write more mean reviews". That's a thing people latch onto as an easy indicator of how reverent modern writing is, but there are plenty. Honestly! What you actually need is dispassionate ANALYSIS of stuff, the type of writing that says "I don't care if X artist thinks this is MEAN or REDUCTIVE, I'm writing what I think." You know, like me, the main character!

I don't think there's any sort of worry about offending the Brand New Heavies - I just think the idea of "coining a term" would literally not occur to the very small sliver of us that give a shit about this style of music. It might not have been that much of a benefit, but in the way that the hyperpop playlist propelled - and continues to propel - random fifteen year olds with energy drink addictions and copies of FL Studio to The Bigtime(TM), something catchy could've done wonders for these lot. What I said about not fitting on a bill with neither your Mac deMarco types presumably cluttering up clubs around the Anglosphere, nor the local Sabbath-worshipping sludge band is a real, material issue. This could be really eating into the bottom line of these lot. Sure, Chino will tap you up for the Dia de los Deftones, but what about the 364.24 days of the year?

Now, to be clear, I also don't mean to say there's NO writing on this style. There's actually a lot of really fucking good stuff! Patrick Lyons' "The Heavy Music To Shoegaze Pipeline" from a couple years back is essential, and this more recent post is a good primer on the biggest label in This Style. It just doesn't give the music a name, or a name that I think works. I'll end by taking one such post to task.

"A Glaring Lack Of Grunge In The Grunge Revival" by Eli Enis is some great work, but its fatal error is, as you'll probably have guessed: none of this shit is grunge. What I said up top is grunge is influenced by classic rock where This Sort Of Music isn't, and what Eli is upset about - a lack of charismatic, sexy vocals (and, by extension, frontpersonning) from anyone in the genre - is a natural consequence of that. The most fundamental influences for Cobain, Cornell, Corgan - wait, what the fuck? Maybe the problem is none of these current lot's surnames start with "Co"? Anyway, their most fundamental influences are Sabbath, Led Zep, the fucking Beatles, even Cheap Trick; these are bands with Frontpeople who Performed hard and almost certainly Fucked. Year Zero for the Brand New Heavies is the second Hum album, and as much as I am the biggest Hum fan in the North West of England, Matt Talbott is not a man I would suggest is blessed with raw sexual charisma.

The meta-problem Eli is grappling with through the medium of Narrow Head et al is far beyond my paygrade: "rock culture", extant from maybe 1954 to when Imagine Dragons formed, was profoundly horny, and the punk, or at least punk-influenced, culture that all these bands operate in frowns on this for a variety of reasons. Spoiler: I'm not gonna fix that in the penultimate paragraph of a meandering blog post. I am incredibly smart and gorgeous and talented but that is too much even for me. Suffice to say, while I kind of agree, there's plenty of that still happening in what currently passes for mainstream rock - the last fucking thing we need is for Matty Healy to start trying any harder to be a Sexy And Edgy Frontperson - and this simply wouldn't be an expectation for any adequately-labelled punk-adjacent band. It's just not what the genre is meant for.  There are supposed to be flat, subdued vocals, more in line with first-gen shoegaze, and retiring frontpeople with hair covering their eyes, zero stage presence and amps turned to fucking eleven. It's shoegaze, kinda, people! They be gazing at they shoes, on god, no cap! This is what I mean by the lack of a term doing them a disservice. Poor Steve Hartlett is being subjected to criticism that he simply did not sign up for!

https://twitter.com/prttymtty/status/1632198225389056001?t=TzcDduH_8VoWLLVXj0CH7Q&s=19

That is my simple thesis. Proper labelling saves lives. So, my loves: can you think of a less dire name than Brand New Heavies? Which popular beat combo are your favourite Brand New Heavies? I think Title Fight's "Head In The Ceiling Fan" is the best song from the genre, which is why I had it lead off the playlist - obviously the rest of it is, as always, just in the order I mentioned the band/song - but it's between Ovlov and Greet Death for my faves. Did you think this was gonna be about acid jazz and now you're disappointed, perhaps filled with a murderous rage? Whatever's up, let me know in the comments section below, and have a good week! xoxo sprezz

Oh, and, FINALLY finally: if for whatever reason you think the idea of melding shoegaze and classic rock with a charismatic, distinctive frontman sounds really good, boy do I have a topic for you in the next couple blogs! Some Might Say I'm way off with this one, but make sure you check back to find out What's The Story!