Happy Dust Gang – Money
The smartest pop songs ever written are pretty dumb once you really stop to listen, or start demanding that you see the lyrics sheet. But it takes amazingly eccentric and smart people to come up with those.
Perhaps that’s the reason why the closest that intellectuals trying to pick up a guitar have come to the glory of any of the classic rock n’ roll records is prog-rock and metal, not exactly achievements one wants to brag about. Not win bands like Happy Dust Gang around.
Still, you’re likely to hear someone covering “Surfin’ Bird” or “Louie, Louie,” provided you manage to build your own time machine, a few centuries into the future, and very much left in their original form.
Happy Dust Gang’s “Money” is a modern-day minimalist garage-rock classic. The song’s simple riff and semi-hysterical vocals are whispered like a mantra from the mouth of a self-help guru. This is a song about excess delivered in the most streamlined manner possible. It’s a real earworm as well, requiring just the very basics and pulling off something special indeed.
Justin Webb & The Noise – Thief In The Night
First, they challenge you, and then they boo. And, if you don’t get mad at either of those things, to top it all off, you win. That’s what happens to people who don’t give up while menacingly spending their time making music that the vast majority of people who hear it won’t like.
Sex Pistols were, we are told, this way. And perhaps it’s the fact that modern artists are much more self-aware that we haven’t quite found a band like it ever since. Where are the bands that dare audiences to hate them before making them love them just the same?
But look over yonder. Here comes Justin Webb & The Noise! And besides them? Nobody! Everyone else who could’ve joined them in this fight is busy reading surveys about what consumers prefer nowadays.
Justin Webb & The Noise’s “Thief In The Night” sounds like a 1980s major label-signed band daring their patrons to fire them. It’s a manic kind of country-rock stomp that cuts through, and gets your attention like some mad preacher shouting from across the street that you’ll definitely go to hell if you don’t stop to listen. Webb & The Noise have the ability to charm because they really don’t sound like they care if they do.
