Porcupine – The Way Down
Genre: Indie Rock, Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
Ask the layman about what alternative rock means, and they’ll either yell out “Nirvana!” or, if they’ve been more attentive to the strategies employed by these kinds of artists, they’ll tell you that it has something to do with power chords and an atypical subject matter. While not very detailed, this is a description that works as it successfully helps classify a few million alternative-rock bands.
Yes, not every band is Ween, alt-rock goofballs with the musical expertise of musical school professors. Most alt-rock bands do use those elements in most of their songs. So, what exactly makes a band really good? Just like the blues, essentially a highly formulaic style, it’s the little sprinkles of inspired ideas and, mainly, the bad ideas kept off the recordings of a really good alt-rock band.
Porcupine’s The Way Down sounds like the majority of alt-rock bands, but just much better. It’s not like they’ve traveled to the far East and found inspiration or that they’ve uncovered an occult musical scale. No, it’s just that their choices and playing are great. The production of the sound is crisp, the vocals are powerful and emotional without ever becoming melodramatic, and the little spaces between the lines in which the musicians can add their fills work excellently. B.B. King may have invented the art of bending a guitar string, but all the rest of us have to find out own way to make the same trick sound original. Porcupine have found theirs.
Jemma Freeman and The Cosmic Something – Easy Peeler
Genre: Grunge, Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
“Do you know how many guitar pedals Kurt Cobain owned?” This sounds like a typical trivia question or intro to an article in Guitar Player magazine. And the answer is, well, probably plenty. But, what is more, important is how many of them he used to play in a live show. The answer to that is two!
Well, if only two pedals would suffice to produce the famous sound that would become a blueprint for alt-rock, then those pieces of gear must’ve been pretty important. Not really! Cobain would use any distortion pedal and any tremolo or reverb that was available.
See, the thing is that great rock bands know what’s unimportant. They cut right to the chase if their ideas are good enough. Jemma Freeman and The Cosmic Something’s Easy Peeler is such a great piece of bizarro garage rock that it requires no attention to fancy playing or production tricks. It’s not out of laziness but out of confidence. Artists don’t get to keep it simple unless they are really good.
