I’m definitely paraphrasing when discussing an interesting quote in Lizzy Goodman’s oral history compilation Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011. This quote stood out for being both blunt as well as resoundingly true. If you are not familiar with this seminal 2017 publication, Goodman basically took thousands of hours of interviews with some of the most important musicians, critics, and record producers of NYC’s Rock resurgence, including The Strokes, The Rapture, TV on the Radio, Interpol, The Walkmen, LCD Soundsystem, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to stitch-together an absorbing storytelling exposition covering the history of the early 21st Century NYC music scene. The quote goes something like ‘reverb has always been a tool of rebellion used by Rock N’ Roll against the mainstream’.
The context of this quote, no matter how much I just improvised the spirit and content in the paraphrasing, is in a discussion of who in the NYC modern Rock scene were concerned with cultivating a “rebel” image and who wasn’t. Ironically, it was often the musicians from wealthy and upper middle-class families most concerned with being regarded as anti-Pop and most desired to clash with refined tastes while also being perceived as iconoclastic. It’s as if the privileged are often living comfortable enough lives they escape boredom by beginning an all-consuming quest to appear as antagonizers of the very status and class structure that has born them the ability to freely choose a rebel image. The other interesting point made in the book by another musician, whom I’m unsure I can attribute the quote to (I want to say it was either Ryan Adams or Conor Oberst… whomever said it was onto something), was those who were truly from lower-class families or with backgrounds of lesser means (and struggling to make ends meet in Manhattan or one of the outer boroughs) were those who didn’t care as much about the image they conveyed and may have been making honest music with less pretense.
These sweeping generalizations can be strategically picked apart for sure, however, some curious patterns seem to appear when ruminating on these conceits. When considering the most important emerging Rock bands of a time beginning in the early 21st Century, most didn’t use reverb as a primary or even secondary method for channeling the sound into something appearing “edgy” or “rebellious”.
The biggest bands of the time like The Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, and The Killers had certain common attributes in the sound, yet these attributes are rarely defined by the major effects like vibrato, tremulo, echo, or reverb. The band that may stand out most for using heavy guitar and vocal effects is White Stripes. Jack and Meg White most likely used them because their influences drew from Garage Rock and Blues Rock forebears (The Stooges, The Cramps, The Sonics, etc.) who often employed more guitar pedals and distortion effects as a way to convey the rebellion in their sound. Some of it may also have to do with Jack White’s comfort level with his own voice. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider the sound of the other groups as the general theme and White Stripes as a possible outlier. In addition, Interpol certainly had their fair share of echo and reverb effects (or the “repeater effect”) with the guitars and vocals, yet it was not in service of what could be construed as a “distorted” sound, but rather a clean Post-Punk aesthetic.
The common threads with most of these groups is up for limited debate, as it’s fairly clear what tied them all together – at least with those earliest and most popular recordings. A Post-Punk attitude may have bound a few of the groups like Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Strokes together, yet an even more pervasive element was the use of simple layered guitars played at a frenetic, angsty pace. Sure The Killers added a layer of glitz and stadium appeal that propelled them to greater heights of popular success than most of the others (they also didn’t share the jaded shade of sarcasm of the others’, this most evident in Brandon Flowers’ vocals). However, the formula they created was based on what Interpol and The Strokes pioneered, and they admit as much.
It was basically the aggressive attitude, fast tempo of layered guitars and rhythms, and simple repeating elements delivered with speed and precision that became shared aspects of these early 00’s bands. The other common theme or backbone for the sound, regardless of where each band strayed from the other, could be described as powerful and aggressive messages of rebellion delivered in the songwriting. This lyrical component to the songs was usually delivered over complex layered production meant to be bigger and louder rather than distorted and washed. All of these bands gravitated more towards clear and clean production even if the instrumentation was brash or heavy. A strange appeal of those early 00’s modern Rock bands was music that flaunted modern advances in production style as well as the mass appeal of computer-aided constructs. The antiseptic quality of the production was typically contrasted with a clashing vocal or songwriting style, or some other form of tacit rebellion.
Sure, these bands became successful for doubling down on certain unique traits in their music, like the Strokes for their stylishly fatalistic message delivered with supreme apathy or Yeah Yeah Yeahs for Karen O’s idiosyncratic personality and performance chops (in fact they gained more recognition steering towards crisper big production style with It’s Blitz! (2009) and away from fuzzy Punk-heavy sounds of their debut Fever to Tell (2003)) – just as a couple examples.
The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem made names for themselves by appealing to the danceable loops of House as well as the Electronic Rock aspects of the genre. They also maintained the layered, fast-paced repetition that connected them to their peers. Even the noteworthy bands that followed this first wave, such as Vampire Weekend and Kings of Leon, created clean and precise sounds relying far more on complex layered guitars and rhythms to propel the music. Kings of Leon would be tagged the “southern Strokes” for their similar use of stacked guitars and Post-Punk bias to create a big sound. Vampire Weekend would make their sound even more melodic with fresh lilting guitars and syncopated Afro-rhythms- all of which diverged greatly from the original movement’s dissonant sounds. By this point the second wave comprised of The Killers, Kings of Leon, and Vampire Weekend sounded much different than their predecessors who paved the way for all the greater successes. Despite this, the underpinnings in the sound and common attributes remained steady.
So when did reverb rise again as a mechanism of popular rebellion? Well, one thing we know for sure is popular music, and the underground or anti-Pop, are cyclical and will always be cyclical. Eventually the implementation of certain distortion/reverb techniques crops up again for the desired effect of creating edgy and rebellious music.
The context created by what was happening in the first decade of the 21st Century Rock music can explain much about what happened in the second decade. The sound grown in New York City, and specifically the lower bowels of Manhattan, propelled the big and brash Stadium Rock sound that was at its apex with the aforementioned It’s Blitz! by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Killers’ Sam’s Town (2006), Kings of Leon’s Because of the Times (2007), and Arctic Monkey’s Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006). However, by the middle of the first decade the focus was shifting away from what The Strokes had created and towards the anti-response in Brooklyn. What was furtively developing in the artists’ lofts and dingy basements of Brooklyn, which is so expertly chronicled in Meet Me in the Bathroom, is the rebellion to the sound that was once itself considered rebellious and “hip”. Eventually the music of The Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Killers was considered an unnecessary excess of a form of Rock that had gone bad. Or in other words, the “sellout” of their version of Rock n’ Roll to popular culture.
Sound familiar? The cycles of popular Rock music from one movement to the next often follows a formula repeating itself in cycles. First you have a popular wave of Rock ripening to the point of “perfection” yet then turning to “excessive rot”, shortly thereafter. This then leads to the growth of a new movement sounding deliberately different in order to become a replacement voice of the undercurrent. This is forever happening and we are all in the clutches of some stage of this perpetual phase change.
By 2009, we were seeing the flower of the diverging counter-movement in Rock at its finest bloom. Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Yeasayer, Grizzly Bear, and Fleet Foxes were now at the vanguard and developing strange yet alluring forms of Indie Rock labeled Freak Folk, Experimental Folk, Noise Rock, and Ambient Drone. Within all of this new Rock was the re-emergence of reverb (and echo, tremolo, vibrato) as a primary driver in what was being construed as the iconoclastic and anti-Pop response. This ties back to some of those ideas mentioned as part of Meet Me in the Bathroom: often times its those of a well-off class that will use reverb as a tool to appear rebellious or edgier than the status quo.
It was clear in reading the backgrounds of many of these groups like Yeasayer, Animal Collective, and especially Grizzly Bear, these were groups of folk from middle to upper-middle class families and often from the heartlands of America (not native to big cities). Many of them had moved to Brooklyn and embraced a counterculture of music vying for the space vacated by bands like The Strokes within the sphere of independent “Rebel Rock”. Members of Grizzly Bear Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen, and Chris Taylor were interviewed for Meet Me in the Bathroom and nearly admitted as much – they came well-educated and with a different sound that would never be within the realm of Interpol or The Strokes. So they began to gain more attention once their sound had achieved the right level of rebellion. The funny paradox in all of this is the previous version of anti-establishment Rock had been so aggressive and brash that the way to be counter was to be less direct and to be more ethereal, cryptic, and perhaps more tender and melodic.
Listen to a few of the select tracks from the next generation and you will see how different the response to brash stadium rock was and how much of it relied on reverb for its “edginess”.
To defy the popular sound in Rock, the sound had to become less abrasive, less fast, less crunchy. What you end up with is something softer and folkier, rooted in earthier tones and more plaintive exposures. And yet the reverb was implemented along with the Electronics and psychedelic charms to create something rebellious enough to be approved by all the young upstarts out there. Things got weird or diluted pretty quickly, and so the life of this counter-culture response to Post-Punk Rock enjoyed a much smaller window of caché than most other rebel movements – at least when analyzing the timeframe in Rock’s history.
Nevertheless, what came afterwards is the same natural progression and cyclical path of Rock music we have seen again and again. Eventually all honest movements are corrupted and exploited to its greatest excess. The rush of 60’s Blues and Folk Rock turned to excess in the 70’s. The Metal and Punk that followed shortly after as a response to the big “Arena Rock” of The Who, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Styx, and REO Speedwagon was again bastardized with Hair Metal and 80’s Synth Rock. Grunge became the natural and ever-so jarring response to the hedonistic excess of the 80s, and yet by the mid-90s we saw the diluted progression of what was once a counter-culture movement when chart-topping success came to acts of Post-Grunge like Matchbox Twenty, Candlebox, Creed, and Nickelback.
The cycle continues onward in a similar fashion. This time we saw the dilution of the rebel movement (this time in the form of Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear’s Indie Rock/Folk) taken to debauched levels by the popular appeal of bands like Mumford & Sons, Of Monsters and Men, and The Lumineers. Mac DeMarco’s tender DIY bedroom Folk turned to “jizz jazz” (a term cheekily coined by Mac himself) pushed forth by bands like Mild High Club, Homeshake, and Loving. Real Estate’s quaint version of Beach Rock best represented by their classic self-titled 2009 album, was co-opted and made pluralistic by dozens of sound-alike bands like DIIV, Pure Bathing Culture, and Day Wave (even the names of the bands were an attempt at reference). By the time we saw Geowolf’s “Saltwater” featured on a painfully exploitive Corona Light commercial, we knew things had gone sour. The haunting reverb-laden Folk of Bon Iver and the ethereal nature of Psych-Folk artists like Animal Collective and Yeasayer was extracted and overwrought by a second wave of artists who certainly doubled-down on the echoey-reverb. For some groups it reached a level nearing medieval Gregorian-chant, emanating from a derelict cathedral. Other groups took things to cloying levels of hippie forest frolic, with the reverb and echo reaching something close to hysterics.
Here are just a few examples of the extreme excess the next wave took from what had been a small and curious Indie movement in the mid to late 00’s.
By the time of Youth Lagoon’s Year of Hibernation (2011) and Secret Cities’ Strange Hearts (2011), things had gotten psychedelic-colored and washed in so much distortion it was basically a howling echo smeared against a dirty window pane. I still enjoyed and actually think Strange Hearts is an underrated gem of an album… yet you could tell the original counter-culture movement had been pulled in opposite directions by either the cloying excesses of the likes of Mumford & Sons and Avett Brothers or into the strange and obscure Hippie-family chant of Le Loup or AU. No matter the derivation, all of them had pulled the rebel appeal out of it and made the sound a maudlin charade. They played with the reverb and folksy charm to the point they’d made something too distorted and esoteric (if you want to hear the epitome of this, listen to Here We Go Magic’s self-titled 2009 album). There are some bright spots from this second wave for sure, some un-praised gems like these:
You can hear something interesting within both Vetiver’s “Can’t You Tell” and Craft Spells’ “After the Moment” that exposes what happened between the first waves’ ambivalent soft splash and after the second waves’ mixed reception as overenthusiastic Psych and Freak Folk: what it is can best be described as a premature level of comfort.
This time around something even more curious happened which might be explained by the shortness and relative lack of exposure of this counter-movement. There was an aberration wherein the artists in the mid-late 2010’s actually began to build on all of the positive elements from the earlier decade. They embraced the brazen and sarcastic attitude of Post-Punk, the feel-good “Beach Rock” distortion of Real Estate, or Beach Fossils, and Indie Folk’s Psychedelic exploration of reverb-laden guitars/vocals to make a sort of amalgam of all these bright spots of 21st Century Rock. To create even more interesting and prolific veins of the overarching Indie Rock, some added even older influences – very much like folding in an unexpected ingredient in a tried and true family recipe in hopes of adding dimension to the original.
Because the Rock artists of the 2010s collected and built upon what was assuredly an all too brief (and most likely never large enough “sub-pop” or rebel movement) reversal in the Modern Rock that started in the mid 00’s, they made the decision to keep rather than destroy the momentum of Rock. Due to this, what came in the later parts of the 2010’s was richer and more interesting. In fact, the genres are more diverse and specialized than ever before. This may be creating the form for what many current artists are releasing now in what I call the “Age of Post-Reverb Rock”. The sound is all the more provocative, fresh, and prolific in today’s digital age of segmented and ever-specialized music consumption. These days, the use of reverb feels more like an artistic license than a forced imperative. In other terms, the music feels more authentic even if the influences can be easily drawn and the many vast combinations detected. In some contradictory way the music is both referential and more honest, with far less pretense than in the past.
Here are just a couple of the noteworthy current artists playing nice with reverb and the disparate influences of the past couple decades, both successfully and in new fresh ways:
Post-Reverb Rock
Naked Giants
The EP by Naked Giants, 2016’s R.I.P., is basically a marvel in heavy Garage Rock. It’s what happens when a band decides they are going to play without any pretense or inhibition. The Seattle-based band has strong associations with another brilliant Garage / Noise Rock band from that city, Car Seat Headrest. At times the trio has even been listed as part of the band. Although their proper LP debut Sluff (2018) was a bit of a mixed bag, this is one of the strongest live-performing bands out there. The tracks like “Ya Ya” and “Pyramids” from R.I.P. still leave me shook to the core every time I listen. They prove a healthy dose of reverb-drenched, unadulterated Rock can be as liberating as it is reluctantly clever. Naked Giants built on the brash and abrasive sounds from the 00’s but also made themselves a palette-cleanser of sorts when the winsome folkiness of hipster Indie Rock was getting just a bit too tedious.
gauntlet hair
The short-lived brilliance of Gauntlet Hair hit me something fierce. Similar to the R.I.P. album by Naked Giants, the first couple songs off of Gauntlet Hair’s supremely underrated self-titled debut LP in 2011 struck me to the core like very few albums tend to do. The back-to-back tour de force that is “Top Bunk” and “Keep Time” is something I will never forget listening to for the first time. The scale of the sound and the effortless incorporation of big and blustery reverb was so epic that I was tremendously surprised to learn this was a duo from Denver making all that industrial ruckus. Their follow-up Stills (2013), had its moments of brilliance, but you could tell it was a band struggling with direction. Shortly after Stills the band split up making it all too apparent the vision had been torn and frayed and compromised. It doesn’t change the fact that Gauntlet Hair (2011) is one of the greatest artifacts of Post-Reverb Rock.
broncho & dayglow
BRONCHO, along with the band Dayglow, are making the prospects for future Rock much brighter. Both groups released music in 2018 that was authentic, uncompromising, and unrelenting in two very different ways. Dayglow, the project of Texas-bred artist Sloan Struble, is a bit more accessible than BRONCHOS gritty approach. Dayglow’s album Fuzzybrain (2018) was a cheeky take on the Post-Punk stylings that a band like Phoenix snagged from the leather-jacket clutches of The Strokes and made ready for consumption by the masses (as well as car commercials everywhere). Dayglow takes the best of the more accessible aspects of Post-Punk and marries it with Indie Rock – specifically the warm melodic reverb wash that has made it so appealing in recent years. Dayglow also represents that perfect brand of DIY Bedroom Pop that has been on a tear lately on Spotify and Soundcloud.
BRONCHO and their laser-focused release Bad Behavior (2018) is very different in regards to both themes and style, yet has taken the brash swaggering attitude of Post-Punk and combined it with the production-style and reverb-heavy aspects of the 2010s Indie and Garage Rock. Bad Behavior is one of those album’s I came to late. However, once I found it was completely absorbed in all of its the hard-hitting demeanor as well as its perfect symmetry between the early 00’s bravado of a band like Interpol re-created with a layer of grit and gruff befitting a frayed-edge sort of band that might worship a band like The Stooges. “Big City Boys” is a gem of a track, along with other great ones like “Sandman” and “Boys Got to Go”. These tracks always give me goosebumps for being so stylish and replete with a relic of attitude rarely heard today in the Post-Reverb Rock world.
current joys
I wanted to save Current Joys for last because this is my secret favorite band. When I first heard the album Wild Heart (2013) for the first time a couple years ago, I couldn’t stop listening. The album immediately made its way onto the list of Top 50 Albums of the Decade regardless of how referential the sound was to the gloom & doom Rock icons of the 80’s like The Cure, The Smiths, and Joy Division. It doesn’t matter the influences, the album is this cohesive item of beauty and nostalgia as well as a testament to the power of reverb. For me, the sound captured the spirit of many different decades, yet the heavy effects on the guitars and vocals was so perfectly suited to a kind of emotion that is as relevant as ever. I needed to listen many more times in rapid succession to hold onto the feelings. To name just a few of these feelings: there’s melancholy, reverie, joy, hope, and longing. Current Joys’ follow-up albums Me Oh My Mirror (2016) and A Different Age (2018) are strong, underrated releases as well, but nothing will touch the immaculately cohesive nature of Wild Heart. Take a listen to the version of Grimes’ “Symphonia IX” below, which is one of the greatest song covers I’ve ever heard. Nicholas Rattigan is an unsung artist in many ways. His other band, Surf Curse, is another one worth looking into. Yet, Current Joys and the album Wild Heart will remain the brightest of spots in Post Reverb Rock.
