TV Death – Scarecrow
Similar artists: The Cramps, Viagra Boys, The Birthday Party, The Damned
Genre: Post-Punk, Garage Rock
The majority of us are slaves to made-up confidence and baseless bravado, and without it, we might not even get out of bed in the morning. It’s easy to hear this in many of the songs that you hear daily or see it in the eyes of actors dying in front of a camera and being buried in front of a paying audience. TV Death have an infallible system to defeat the nerves, and it all starts with a passion for classic punk music.
Where would we all be without superheroes? Certainly, when it comes to the entertainment industry, business would likely grind to a screeching halt. We usually don’t just buy into a song or a film but also into the confidence that a performer can muster. The most clever of us, like the folks in TV Death, end up wearing that confidence as a shield against the world.
TV Death’s “Scarecrow” sounds like the tune that The Cramps never got to record. But this is not merely a soundalike. It’s also a song that captures the enthusiasm and campiness of Lux Interiors’ best songs. The vocals are spot on Lux, jangling with the same kind of perverted, demented zest for life. And the line “There’s a scarecrow in the field of love” must have surely been one that this modern U.K. group swiped after being allowed to read lyrics drafts from The Cramps. Either way that this came about, it is no stranger to some rotten fun.
Grand Sun – Something More
Artists: Similar artists: Parquet Courts, Echo & the Bunnymen, THUS LOVE, Courtney Barnett, shame
Genre: Post-Punk, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
Marcel Duchamp once thought of bringing in a urinal to an art show. It was a great hit. Most art critics praised Duchamp’s concept. The same art piece is not the centrepiece of Tate Modern. It’s hard to tell a visual artist that they’re wrong. It’s much easier to assume that a modern artist simply has a vision that few others could understand, and it feels risky to challenge them.
The same luxury, however, is not awarded to modern musicians. For the most part, they need to be human jukeboxes cranking out the kinds of sounds to which we have grown accustomed. Any two minutes of songs that do not include a clear hook are generally deemed a waste of time. And bands that cannot provide songs that resemble hits are wiped out of history.
Grand Sun’s “Something More” is constructed as much as an art piece as a pop song. Sure, there are guitars playing riffs, drums keeping a beat and aa pretty pleasant vocal melody throughout the tune. But the sounds are designed to feel like somebody pushing you violently and running away. The lyrics are meant to get you asking questions that you won’t be able to answer. And, the band won’t ever intervene long enough to cure your uncertainty. If you could hang this on a wall in a gallery, you could convince people to make you rich.
