The Polite Heretic – How A Storm Becomes A Memory
Similar artists: Listener, La Dispute
Genre: Post Rock
There’s only so much you can learn from books and their modern substitute, Netflix-produced b-movies. And this is a wonderful thing. There’s no real guidebook for life, and the ones trying to sell you one are making a fortune off the chumps that would buy it. For the most part, you go in alone and make a fool out of yourself, or more rarely, become a hero.
That’s a great thing, even if it doesn’t appear like that at the moment. Skidding off the track and crashing into a tree while on the Highway of Life is a realistic possibility. But what else would you rather be doing? Paradise, according to most religions, involves sitting in a garden, eating finger sandwiches all day, and conversing with virgins. If you wanted that, you could just as well have never graduated high school.
Of course, while you’re busy testing the limits of reality, you’ll also need a soundtrack, preferably something with few but meaningful words. Something like The Polite Heretic. Their post-rock blend is meant to make you feel like you’re the first and the only person to have ever encountered the feelings you’re having. That’s great. You should think that. And, music ought to make you feel this. Plus, while The Polite Heretic are a band of few words, they do leave you with this nugget of wisdom: “All things that are secret die in the dark.”
Santo Sur – Somewhere I Belong
Similar artists: Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Jerry Cantrell, Metallica
Genre: Alternative Rock
The sound introduced by Seattle 1990s rock bands has remained quite popular to the present day. The main difference between the originators and followers, between grunge and post-grunge groups, is subtlety. Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Nirvana did wonderful unplugged sessions. Disturbed brutalized ‘The Sound of Silence” like a Doberman trained to maim its victim. The closest it understands emotional subtlety is having its chin-door-knob singer start crying in front of the camera.
The point of the matter is that the originators didn’t just make loud, angry garage-rock music. That was their calling card, sure. But these were artists ready and willing to explore what could be done sonically. This is one of the reasons why many of their most famous songs feature acoustic guitars and, in the case of Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley, wonderful vocal harmonizing.
Santo Sur’s “Somewhere I Belong” is the kind of grunge song that refuses to play up to the expected tropes of the genre. There are no screamed vocals or dissonant guitar riffs. Great acoustic guitar playing, Latin grooves, and sincere emotions are brought to the forefront instead. It dares to dream of taking the musical genre forward rather than exploiting its popularity. And we’d like to think that Kurt, Chris, Layne or Mark would approve of that.
