The Endless Mountain Derelicts – The Ditch
Genre: Folk rock, Southern-rock
The vast majority of modern music is created so that it will not interfere too much with your day. This is the very recipe that radio and television stations apply. As a consequence, most commercial music is destined to never bother us too much from our slumber.
Still, it’s easy to understand why that might be the case. It’s very difficult to look at the world as it is. Or, in other words, it’s hard to gaze upon the worst aspects of the world and carry on with drinking your morning coffee.
It takes some very brave souls to venture down there. And it takes some near-crazy people to document their findings and try to disrupt others with these revelations. However, it’s the artists that have the stomach for this who have the best chance of achieving some sort of immortality through their work.
The Endless Mountain Derelicts’ The Ditch is a trip downtown through scenes of horrific squalor. These tales must be true, but few of us are willing to go there are really find out for ourselves. There’s poetry in The Ditch and even some hope in the rubble of so many fractured lives.
Elle E – Sugar Tits
Similar artists: HONEYMOAN, Julia Robert, Le Tigre, CSS, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Genre: Garage Rock, Punk
In the modern world, something that is deemed to be punk-rock is … err. Cool. It’s something someone should strive for. It’s an objective. It’s the cowboy rolling cigarettes or the movie star driving too fast on the cliffs.
But what qualifies something as punk rock? Surely, it’s not just the sound. After all, many of the most famous modern punk rockers sound nothing like the bands famous for inventing the style.
More than anything, being a punk, supposedly, means taking chances. It involves being confrontational when needed in order to express an opinion. And it ought to involve opinions about things that actually matter.
Punk-rock is rarely vague, and neither is Elle E’s Sugar Tits. It’s a song about nagging but condoned sexism. It’s a song about something that is unlikely to ever go away. People are just nasty like that. It’s rather uncomfortable to consider. And because of these reasons, it’s an important song. It’s punk rock in that way!
