No. 22 - False (Guitar) Idols Fall edition 🎸🗿🚫
Bro, do you even riff?
Like some of my previous posts, this is based on some ideas I kicked around in a recent review I wrote.
Indie rock has had a falling out with the guitar riff.
Over the last 15 years, what was once the organizing force behind any kind of guitar-based music has taken a back seat to mood and vibe. Don’t believe me? Try to think of five memorable guitar riffs from the last 10 years that weren’t made by retro-leaning nostalgia rockers à la Black Keys or Greta Van Fleet.
Hold on. I’ll give you a minute.
This wasn’t the case in the past; take any decade from the rock era (basically 1955 onward) and riffs, a series of notes or chords repeated throughout a song, immediately start pouring out. Think “Back in Black,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Those songs essentially exist to support their main riffs.
Indie rock, an entire genre dedicated to bucking the rock and rock star tropes, still cling to the guitar riff though, something that genre gatekeepers would point to as proof of the music’s “authenticity.” There’s an alternate list of guitar heroes that swaps out Clapton, Hendrix and Van Halen for Marr, Mascis and Moore (Jack White was the unicorn that made the crossover), and that tradition of flouting the traditional rock narrative, while not straying that far from it, continued.
But something flipped around 2010.
Every generation needs of artists need to find their own voice and simply doing what worked in the past generally doesn’t produce the best results (see: all the post-grunge bands the popped up in Nirvana’s wake). Also, in its 50 years of cultural dominance, guitar rock built up a pretty misogynistic and, at times, racist reputation. No wonder the kids were done with this shit.
Mainstream music fell out of love with guitar rock sometime around the moment that Napster appeared on the scene. Garage rockers like The Hives and the New York scene that produced The Strokes and Interpol put up a fight. But they never really stood a chance as electronic and hip hop production styles and sounds crept into every facet of popular music. Guitars remain omnipresent, particularly with any group of musicians that describes itself as a “band.” But those guitars have been run through so many digital effects that even when bands like The 1975 do offer up some guitar hooks, they rarely actually sound like guitars.
Radiohead’s Kid A - released in 2000 - was probably a lot of people’s first time listening to a “rock” album that wasn’t based around a series of riffs - at least it was for me. And at the time it felt like a (brilliant!) one-off. But while Radiohead’s transition away from the trappings of rock bands tends to get siloed-off from the rest of the musical conversation. But while Radiohead were something of an island unto themselves, their inspirations (IDM, the Warp Records catalog) were available for anyone who cared to listen. They were just the first - and it turns out, not the last - to successfully meld the styles.
The effect wasn’t immediate, but you could see shifts happening throughout the decade and by 2010, indie rock’s leading lights - aka the second generation of New York bands who colonized Brooklyn - were pivoting away from riff-based tunes. In this sense, Justin Vernon and the Dessner brother - Aaron and Bryce - weren’t quite pioneers. But as members of two of the era's biggest and most culturally significant indie bands — Bon Iver and The National, respectively — they made little effort to make amends.
Vernon could have ended up somewhere down that road (the guitar hero part - not the racist and misogynistic part). The narrative around his sparse, guitar-based debut, famously recorded in an isolated Wisconsin cabin, threatened to overtake its content. He quickly veered left and has been confounding expectations since, building big moody walls of sound out of a variety of instruments, including synths and other digital effects.
The Dessners - both guitarists - have spent most of their career actively pushing against the conventions of rock guitar playing; someone smarter than I (though I can’t recall who) wisely cited the little four-note doodle in 2017’s “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” as the closest they’ve come to writing an actual riff. They are the foremost purveyors of a kind of mood rock, that layers guitars, bass and drums, building songs over the course of songs and albums, and they bring those aesthetics to their outside projects as well; Taylor Swift’s folklore/evermore records are steeped in it. Meanwhile, Vernon and Aaron’s Big Red Machine project is a masterclass in this aesthetic.
Vernon and Dessner are also indicative of a larger movement where, one-by-one, the era’s great guitar hero hopes have slowly abandoned the instrument, or at least sought to use it in a significantly different way than their predecessors. The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner produced one of the most visceral sounds with his guitar, matching lead singer Karen O’s fury on the band’s debut, Fever to Tell. But by 2009’s It’s Blitz! he’d adopted a smoother digital sound. Jack White, noted retro-purist and his generation’s closet thing to an honest-to-god guitar hero, digitized his sound and added synthesizers to 2018’s Boarding House Reach while St. Vincent, one of the few indie rock artists to grace the hallowed cover of Guitar World (“I did a quick Google search of women on the cover, and all I really saw was girls in bikinis holding guitars like they’ve never held a guitar before,” she said of her fashion choice for the shoot), has similarly moved away from a more traditional guitar-based sound.
There are, of course, plenty of bands still making guitar-based music that sounds like guitar-based music - see this year’s explosion of excellent post-punk releases. And my favorite record of the year, Turnstile’s Glow On is built on plenty of riffs as are any number of new records, including bands specifically calling back to the 90s - check out New York’s grunge/post-hardcore crew Soul Blind - the last time guitar riffs could be said to be truly driving rock culture in some significant way. That can’t be said for any of these modern groups. Even Turnstile, who have experienced a significant breakthrough outside the confines of hardcore, primarily remain an underground concern, albeit a big fish in that relatively small pond.
It’s not for nothing that one of the most prominent guitar-based sound of the last 10 years or so has been shoegaze, a genre that has always eschewed riffs in favour of a mood or vibe. The re-emergence of scene godheads My Bloody Valentine and reformation of veterans like Ride and Slowdive has been complemented by a slew of new bands like Diiv, Peel Dream Magazine and Zoon. The heavier end of the shoegaze spectrum has seen even more activity, with Nothing, Deafheaven and Holy Fawn repping a new guard bolstered by reunited Swervedriver, Hum and Failure (Deftones never went away, but their rep has soared in the last five years as people have finally recognized that their attachment to nu-metal was tangential)
Of course, this whole discourse could all be moot; it was recently reported that after teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, a pandemic-induced uptick in guitar sales has flipped Guitar Center’s fortunes. The American chain is now seeking an IPO. If you’ve stepped into any kind of music store in the past couple of decades you’ll know that their wares now go well beyond just guitars. But given the company’s turnaround, one has to assume that there is now a shit-load of kids armed with six-strings trying to figure out how to make some new noise.
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
I interviewed Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan for Exclaim!, which is a pretty cool thing to write. He’s got a new solo album, called Impostor, with LA production duo Soulsavers. It’s a covers record, with Gahan taking on tracks by the likes of Cat Power, Mark Lanegan, PJ Harvey and, uh, Nat King Cole.
Doing interviews with big rock stars on Zoom is a bit of a trip. I work from home at our dining room table, with the computer facing my records, which means that Gahan was staring at my collection for the entire interview. “Motörhead, the juxtaposition with Eno,” he said at the end of the interview, “very cool.”
Yes, there is no editorial justification for this anecdote other than self-aggrandizement. #Sorrynotsorry
Kool Kids Musc Recommendation Club
MUNA never found a pop hook they didn’t like, but on “Silk Chiffon” they go for the jugular. This thing feels like a lost Matrix track from the early 2000s - I can imagine Ashley Simpson or Hilary Duff having a go at this. But MUNA throw a nice LGBTQ twist on that formula, with a video that pays homage to conversion-therapy rom-com (a genre of one) But I’m A Cheerleader. Oh, and their boss Phoebe Bridgers (they’re now signed to her Saddest Factory Records) pops buy for a verse. Bonus cut: they fucking killed it with this song on The Late Late Show with James Corden.
I’m a bad Canadian. I don’t really know much about Glenn Gould, other than that he’s a big deal in classical music and that, as a Canadian music fan, I’m supposed to revere him. All of which is to say, I can’t say much about the Gould Sample Meg Remy and co deploy in this, other than this is part of the deluxe edition of producer Billy Wild’s Gould remix album, Uninvited Guest, which came out last year. In the hands of US Girls it becomes a slinky groove about the joys of a perfect out-of-body experience. Speaking of which, it’s probably damn time I listened to The Goldberg Variations…
Montreal’s Gulfer really level up here. The Montreal quartet have been making mathy emo rock for a while now - 2018’s Dog Bless was a real gem and last year’s self-titled record is well worth your time as well. But “End of the World” seems like something of a breakthrough in terms of songcraft. It’s more anthemic, with some true punch-the-air moments and great pacing - shoutout the half-time middle section that leads into a triumphant finale.
Ben Cook has worn a lot of hats over the course of his two-plus decade career. He’s probably best known for playing guitar in Fucked Up (from whom he’s apparently split). But he previously fronted hardcore crew No Warning, crafted in the wonderfully catchy power-pop of Marvelous Darlings, and made sleazy chillwave as Yacht Club (just to name a few). Yet over the past 10 years, he’s repeatedly returned to his Young Guv moniker, which tends to lean into classic indue rock for its semi-warped and mutable sound. “Lo Lo Lonely” comes from the first of two albums Cook is releasing next year. GUV III arrives in March with GUV IV scheduled for later in the year. It’s got strong classic Teenage Fanclub vibes, which is just fine by me.
Melbourne trio Camp Cope have been rather quiet since 2018’s excellent How to Socialize and Make Friends. But they’ve re-emerged with “Blue” a real laid-back stunner full of beautiful harmonies and devotion (though it’s not entirely clear if it’s returned). FWIW, bass player Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich recently threaten/promised to release a 10-minute version of “The Opener” from How to Socialize a la Talyor, and quite frankly I’m here for it.
Hannah Judge was making bedroom pop records before she found herself literally bedridden, but the narrative about making her debut EP, Hurt Is Boring, while laid-up from a bout of Crohn’s Disease is too good to pass up. Not that there’s no substance to her work as fanclubwallet - far from it. I’d file her brand of deeply-felt indie-pop alongside fellow Ontarians Kicksie and Dad Sports. “Car Crash in G Major” is my favourite from the EP, though there are plenty to choose from. Describing herself to canadianbeats.ca Judge commented “I’ve got an obsession with cheap keyboards I just can’t beat, and I haven’t changed my guitar strings since I got the guitar itself in the sixth grade; which makes every music-type boyfriend I’ve ever had very angry,” which only makes me like her more.
Hidden Bonus Track
Glee if it was made by sex-positive indie, alt and goth kids.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions.