Rare Monk – Silverlake
There’s never been a better time to invest in crypto, buy supplies for an upcoming Apocalypse, or make pop music if you’re a rock musician. When it comes to the last of those three revelations, you should know that never has the music community been less snobbish.
Once the genre aisles were deeply segregated, bands had to stay in their lane in fear of retribution from their fans. You couldn’t have Miley Cyrus making a rock record, or Corey Taylor making an Imagine Dragons one, no.
Furthermore, if you were a singer, you had to find the right musicians to play with you and these were usually less limber in breaking out the dance grooves, as a respite from the rock assault.
Rare Monk is a band taking advantage of what pop has offered us in recent years. The greatest gift pop has bestowed on us is a production as sweet and infectious as bootleg candy with honey frosting. Silverlake is that sort of tune, cut and glistening like a diamond worth a million bucks.
Bad Bloom – Tokyo
Rock music can’t help but soak up the sounds that are around it at different times. The original metal bands had a habit of syncing their punishing drum sounds and guitar riffs to the sound of the industrial machinery that served as the sonic backdrop in the towns and cities where they were living.
Shoegaze bands evoked the sound of electricity pulsating through the veins of a city, enveloping it in artificial light. Together with new-wave music, it was the sound of the artificial.
Modern rock, more than ever, explores the sonic textures of electronic instrumentation. It’s the sound of virtual. Music that computers imagine and humans assemble. They can’t quite make Beatles records yet, but the AI is on to a promising start.
Bad Bloom belong to the era of shoegaze. Their sound slithers and pulsates like a light-bulb threatening to go off at any moment. Their playing abilities, however, on single Tokyo, show a band that has worked on its craft for a long time and is confident to include clever, sophisticated musical elements in their slow-burning, dream-pop.