Kid Cult – Doctor Doctor
Similar artists: Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Jay Reatard, Sonic Youth, Green Day
Genre: Grunge, Indie Rock, Garage Rock
There’s a time and a place for most things. Thankfully, the time for grunge music is not over yet, and the place to enjoy it could well be your living room in whatever part of the world you’re living. Blame it all on sensible planning! What this garage-rock-inspired style of music managed to do is crack a mathematical formula. Folks like ourselves or Kid Cult have not had enough of it just yet. In fact, the group in question is working on contributing to the next chapter of grunge.
Who knew that a style of music based on such simple elements would, in fact, turn out to have such a history? Well, in retrospect, it should’ve all been obvious. For all the talk of “alternative thinking,” groups like Nirvana, or their often copied predecessors, Pixies, managed to reduce rock n’ roll to its bare essentials and to pick out its best parts. What’s not to enjoy about this?
Kid Cult’s “Doctor Doctor” feels like a band that has put together a do-it-yourself rock set and purposely placed some of the pieces in the wrong place. It doesn’t much matter. Symmetry is at the heart of a style of music that favours loud-soft dynamics, excellently distorted vocals, and lyrics that evaluate and go deep inside the human psyche. And, while you may be too intimidated by this loud sound at first, there is also humour in Kid Cult’s music. Just strain really hard, and you’ll hear it.
Butterfly Bulldozer – BTF BDZ
Similar artists: SLIFT, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Squid, Pond, Lysistrata
Genre: Post-Punk, Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
You’d half expect that a time traveller arriving in the present day from, let’s say, Western Europe of the 1980s would be… unimpressed. Surely, there ought to be flying cars by now. Not to mention all the trouble with the wars and the climate. Haven’t we solved those yet? Music, and art in general, has to have turned out better though, right? Nah, there’s still not much to write home about.
Like modern tech, we have ways of increasing various parameters associated with rock music. But it’s not helping much. The death and black metal bands all sound like dogs barking at sowing machines. All the dance acts sample the same 70s disco bass lines. Simply put, we’ve grown sideways but not upwards. Few have fresh ideas, and fewer still have the ability to create music that sounds genuinely rowdy.
Butterfly Bulldozer’s “BTF BDZ” sounds like nasty music made in a garage by strange people who, by the sounds of it, have a dream of floating out into space and escaping this boring world. It’s no wonder that they’d dream of this. Their sound is one that comes from the gut. There’s little time to half-guess themselves. It’s the kind of music that is impressive because it puts the human element front and centre, not disguised behind fancy production tricks. Our time travelling friend might still find some things to give them a thrill.
