Pressing Need – Shut Up
Similar artists: The Replacements, Generation X, The Velvet Underground, The Smithereens
Genre: Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
Military budgets are up everywhere! And, if indeed, as some analysts predict, we’re about to blow ourselves back to the stone age, why shouldn’t music reflect that too? The rock n’ roll stone age gave us some of the best records, usually made by non-musician musicians with plenty of ideas and little desire to put in the effort to execute all of them.
The loudness wars have already left all of us scarred. You can’t even depend on a Metallica record to sound like heavy metal anymore. I mean, sure, you can tell that distorted guitars have been used. But does it really scare you? Does it forcefully move you away from the speaker when you turn up the dial? Maybe it’s just time we give up on over-produced records.
If giving up is your thing, you may just love Pressing Need’s “Shut Up.” They sound like one of the notorious drunk live sets played by the replacements if Paul Westerberg had fallen asleep backstage. They’re nasty, make a really nice riot and don’t even have the time to mix their records. They’re the band for us. With so little hope, they might just be our only hope.
Taverns – Jungle Juice
Genre: Surf Rock, Lo-fi Rock, Dream Pop
There are only so many things that everyday, ordinary words can say about the true complexity of life. Sure, you can write a grocery list or a Presidential speech using them. However, truly important, difficult topics such as love, hate, sex and death are not ones best tackled using the same vocabulary. To do it is merely to cheapen those precious things.
The language of pop music functions in much the same way. Of course, your meat and potatoes subjects are easily tackled. You can always depend on pop music to provide songs about going to the club, riding a fast car, or finding friends on Instragram. But when it comes to songs that explore the aforementioned topics, they require the exploration that pop songs cannot guarantee.
Taverns’ “Jungle Juice” is a poetic meditation on love in the form of Summery, made-for-the-beach kind of indie-rock. Yes, the sound is gently breezy, as if it’s coming out of a land where it’s June all year round. Still, you get the feeling that there’s something important hidden in between the surf-rock riffs and lightly sung vocal lines. Someone spent the time to discover a language for the things that are hard to say.
