Who Killed the Anger?

Noise/Experimental Rock in the Digital Era

William Sundwick

I didn’t realize, until doing some research, that today’s popular music streaming services are at least partially owned by the traditional major record labels – Sony, Universal, Warner.  While Internet streaming can, theoretically, be a path for “DIY music,”  the exposure of the services to placement of bands signed with major labels is inescapable. There are also “artist aggregators,” like CDBaby and TuneCore, who will charge artists an annual subscription fee, or per-track fee, to handle digital distribution – becoming, in effect, streaming labels.

Apparently, digital music streaming, now the primary means of distribution for new bands, has altered the history of rock music. True, indie labels and DIY all have some access to the streaming services, but not all access is equal. Changing fashions are still dictated by major labels. Today’s biggest pop music trends are hip-hop and EDM (electronic dance music). How does anything that used to be called “alternative” or “experimental” get played?

It will likely be a major label that determines whose music gets promoted. Indie labels try to compete, but the market segmentation of audiences that existed for AM/FM terrestrial radio has largely disappeared, replaced by Sirius/XM and Pandora who have services based on genre “channels”. But Spotify, Apple and Amazon (the biggest streaming services) do not. Hence, the majors promoting artists by name once again have all the market clout.

Alternative rock has now become a meaningless category. Perhaps all “genres” have disappeared, leading some critics to claim that rock, itself, is dead.

Yet, new bands keep coming. They all have been inspired by some previous artist. Their motivation can be creative just as much as commercial. Two very different bands, both legitimately rock-oriented, both artistic, have sprung up in this new digital distribution environment. AWOLNATION (they prefer all caps) and Deaf Wish have chosen to pursue separate styles, while tracing their lineage from former rock genres that an aging aficionado like me can appreciate. They are both edgy, if not truly angry. Aaron Bruno’s AWOLNATION mixes Bruce Springsteen’s “industrial” rock ballad sound with a predominately EDM beat, and Australia’s Deaf Wish emerges directly from noise and metal, from Sonic Youth/Velvet Underground roots.

AWOLNATION

Bruno signed early with Red Bull Records, an indie label, and released his first AWOLNATION album, Megalithic Symphony, in 2011 (a megalith is a very large rock). One single from the album, Sail, went platinum. It gave the band early visibility (along with their label). It has since been licensed for TV commercials, and some dramatic TV series episodes. It’s a straight-up rock ballad, “Blame it on my ADD baby” is the chorus – apparently a personal reference for Bruno. But, the tone is clearly one of struggle, whether from ADD, or some unnamed cause. “Maybe I should kill myself” appears in one line. Heavy bass, driving beat, all electronic – good for slow dancing, with a labored tempo. Yes, it’s angry. “Maybe I’m a different breed.”

Three other tracks on that first album illustrate the group’s range. Reviewers attribute the “group” to being basically Aaron Bruno “and friends.” It is firmly in the EDM tradition -- all production, little solo artistry. Burn It Down and Soul Wars use drums as the foundation for the beat, simple rhyming lyrics, rapper style in Burn It Down, punk style in Soul Wars. Both songs have very fast tempos, hard to imagine them as dance music, but perhaps that’s because I don’t know what dances look like anymore! 

Burn It Down’s first verse starts:

“If you’re feeling like I feel then run your life like it’s a dance floor/And if you need a little heat in your face, that’s what I’m here for”

and second verse:

“If you’re feeling like I feel throw your fist through the ceiling/Some people call it crazy well I call it healing”

chorus:

“So burn it down, burn it down.”

This is EDM as it’s meant to be! Soul Wars uses a similar drum-based format for the rapid-fire beat, but substitutes a whiter vocal style, reminiscent of old-time rock-and-roll, like Jerry Lee Lewis. In fact, it’s probably inspired by Bruce Springsteen. The chorus, “I’m on fire,” is a famous Springsteen song title, which AWOLNATION covered for the sound track of the 2015 film, Fifty Shades of Grey.

Finally, Jump on My Shoulders explores a secondary AWOLNATION theme, Christian allegory. It may have been a commercial gamble, as Mumford and Sons, and Robert Plant’s Band of Joy made their appearances at about the same time, but it is present on AWOLNATION’s third album, Here Come the Runts, as well.

The song begins:

“There’s a mad man looking at you/And he wants to take your soul./There’s a mad man with a mad plan/And he’s dancing at your door. Oh/What to do, oh …”

then:

“There’s a mad man with a mad plan/And he waits for us to stumble.”

Soon we hear the chorus:

“Oh, but our eyes are open/Yeah, they’re really open/(Five, four, three, two, one)/I say we rob from the rich/And blow down the door./On to the next/To dance with the poor./Jump on my shoulders./You can jump on my shoulders.”

Not angry music here, but joyful -- a real change.

Here Come the Runts, AWOLNATION’s latest album, was released last February. It opens with the title track, a theatrical zombie march of runts, martial in tone – you can visualize them coming over a hilltop on the horizon, in formation. It’s an invasion of runts! But, in the end, “Okay I am a runt/Baby you are a runt/Baby we are the runts” – indeed! It makes a great electronic pump for the rest of the album.

 Three short tracks illustrate the experimental nature of the album, compared to their earlier work, and to most of what we hear in the mainstream pop choices. Sound Witness System is a very short rap number (2:22), with electronic finish, almost a sound check, but unquestionably qualified as avant garde in my book. Cannonball and Tall Tall Tale are conventional punk and heavy metal tracks, respectively. Cannonball reminds me of The Ramones, but with an “E” for explicit lyrics (hence, listen at your own risk). Yes, obscenity is anger, and is still avant-garde in pop music. Tall Tall Tale grabs the heavy metal baton, even featuring a synthesizer in a few bewitching chords.  These tracks make AWOLNATION’s third studio album far more adventurous than the relatively cautious, mainstream Megalithic Symphony. Is this where they’re going? I hope so!

They can do “pretty,” too. A wonderful slow dance number, perhaps another Springsteen inspired creation, also appears on this album. I consider Seven Sticks of Dynamite to be possibly their finest piece ever. Listen:

“Who wants to dance who wants to slow dance”

“Lipstick like dynamite, seven sticks of dynamite”

 and, finally:

“Fuse the morning, fuse the night/Give me seven sticks of dynamite.”

A brilliant song, suspenseful, mysterious, sweet, catchy tune, but ending with an amped up electronic flourish. If this represents a new genre of rock music, I’m in!

Deaf Wish

From their home in Melbourne, Australia, Deaf Wish has come into the streaming community by signing with alternative music icon, Sub Pop – still an indie label, technically, but much bigger than Red Bull Records. This band traces its style directly back to Sonic Youth and noise rock.  They take heavy metal and gift it with cacophonous noise in place of a simple punk-style beat.

And, the lyrics are very angry. Sub Pop may have been reminded of Nirvana when they signed Deaf Wish.

Two tracks from Lithium Zion, their fifth studio album (second with Sub Pop) are Easy and FFS. Both are characterized by monotone electronic feedback for the rhythm line, nihilistic lyrics sung by Jensen Tjhung in the former song, Sarah Hardiman the latter. The duo, much like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, have a darker outlook on life, depressed and angry (like Kurt Cobain?). Their first Sub Pop album, Pain, was even more brutal – as heard in Dead Air -- here, Hardiman mouths the only vocalization of the entire 6-minute track at its opening:

”In my heart there is blood, in my heart there is only blood.”

The remainder is all electronic feedback – noise, in the best SY tradition, or perhaps Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. The band entered the world strictly as a new noise group, with their 2014 single, St. Vincent’s. They were consciously in the mold of Sonic Youth which had disbanded three years earlier.

It’s good to know that somebody still finds this kind of music worthy of production. And, it’s good to know that a label as established as Sub Pop is willing to take a chance on them.

When I first conceived the pages for Warp & Woof, in early 2017, I defined the “Beats” page as an exploration of the music I liked, which I asserted in my original Welcome piece had ceased to be created at least ten years earlier. I was wrong. I have since discovered both AWOLNATION and Deaf Wish. There is great “alternative” and “experimental” rock still being produced. It is not even that hard to find!

Who Killed the Anger?

Noise and Experimental Rock, 1980s – 2010s

William Sundwick

Punk Rock began in the 1970s as an attempt to strip away the artifice and commercial compromises of art in popular music. It was seen by bands on both sides of the Atlantic -- like The Clash, New York Dolls, and Ramones -- as a path back to the basics of rock-and-roll. It gave expression to working-class alienation and anger as well. Class struggle, adolescent rage, and defiance of social norms all became subjects of the lyrics. The music resurrected blues guitar, strong bass lines, and simple, but pronounced, drums. It was a return to blues roots, but with a modern social message.

Then, the anger became fatiguing to its audience. It needed a boost. Perhaps the original fans “grew up” and a new audience was yet to emerge. But, the genre evolved rather than died. In what is often called “Post-Punk,” groups like The Fall, Joy Division, and Pere Ubu picked certain punk themes to explore, while eschewing others. Nihilism in some cases replaced anger. But, the proliferation of sounds and styles in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s exceeded the ability to find genre names for them. It seemed like every band was its own genre – New Wave became No Wave, Punk became Gothic, etc.

One thing remained unchanged; bands needed a recording label. There was now, fortunately, more competition in this area than in the days of AM radio. ”Indie” labels began to proliferate, and “college radio” (on FM) became the new trendsetter, reaching a much wider audience by the eighties than AM. It was the age of cassette, and widespread dubbing. As business models and technology changed, so did the music.

The emergence of heavy metal and noise rock had been pioneered all the way back in the late 1960s by the Velvet Underground. Their second album, White Light/White Heat (1968) was arguably the first example of both these genres. In the late 1980s, indie Seattle label Sub Pop signed two local groups – Nirvana and Soundgarden – and promoted a new style. It was called “grunge,” based on the stage appearance of the bands. A market for “fusion styles” of rock, combining metal, grunge, and post-punk followed.  The genre known as noise rock by some reviewers was epitomized by New York band Sonic Youth.

Some, including this reviewer, find Sonic Youth the most compelling, and complete, of all the rock bands of the era. They finally disbanded in 2011 after a traumatic breakup of their two founders, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.

Perhaps their best album is their third studio release, Daydream Nation (1988). It explores their roots, from Lou Reed’s experimental Metal Machine Music, and The Velvet Underground, to heavy metal’s Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead. In a collection of very electronic, very cacophonous, tracks they develop their format of melodious, almost pop-sounding, beginning, then a descent into chaos in the middle, and a reprise of the initial tune in the final chords. Their lyrics borrow standard punk themes.

An excellent example of this is the seven-and-a-half-minute track “Total Trash.” The lyrics are not especially meaningful but fit well into the overall architecture of the piece. It starts with a pleasant, almost easy-listening tune (reminiscent of sixties “surf music”) and repeats that theme for nearly three minutes, as the generally mindless lyrics are sung by Moore and Gordon – “It’s total trash.” At the three-minute mark in the track, something happens. The melody disappears, drowned out by electronic feedback, with only a faint undercurrent of drums. Even that semblance of order transmutes by four minutes into an entirely different, much faster, beat. It’s all feedback and distortion – noise – until six minutes, when the surf music returns, intact from the opening chords. But in less than a minute the chorus repeats, then fades out into more electronic noise. This is SY’s key signature.

Many tracks on the album follow the same formula – familiar sounding melody and lyrics, electronic dissonance, return to melody. It was the essence of noise rock. Daydream Nation was added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2005, having received rave reviews by Rolling Stone and other critics when first released.

Some variations on this format are found in The Wonder, which starts out with high electronic anxiety, proceeds through a frenetically fast beat, making you think a better title might be the Silicon Valley mantra, “move fast and break things,” This song simply runs out of energy at the end, after a short interlude of panicked feedback before slowing the tempo into the fadeout. “I’m just walking around, your city is a wonder town” is the chorus.

Borrowing more heavily from punk and metal, Silver Rocket also starts with a familiar tune, harder and rougher than some others, cacophony in the middle, then initial theme resurrected by the end – chorus on this one, “You got it. Yeah, ride the silver rocket. Can’t stop it. Burnin’ hole in your pocket.”

Through their career, Moore and Gordon were looking for new indie labels. They started with SST, abandoned them for Enigma Records with Daydream Nation, then once that album catapulted them to international fame, they sought to try major labels. Yet, they never signed with any. Ultimately, they created their own label, SYR. Distribution was now largely via the Internet, so this made sense. They could do it on their own!

Overall, SY manages to take experimental electronic rock from the age of the Velvets and Lou Reed, adds heavy metal, like Motorhead, and creates a very new experience.

But, we heard little more like this until about 2011, when “alternative rock” ceased to be an identifiable genre – and genres in general became unimportant. Part two of the question, “Who Killed the Anger?” focuses on new developments in marketing music, and two contemporary bands worth noting: AWOL Nation and Australia’s Deaf Wish. The anger has returned!