Once upon a time there was a great wellspring of new Rock music in the world running ragged down a glorious mountainside. It wasn’t too long ago either, like a monsoon rain coming down overnight that people awoke to the next day. In the light of day people saw how Rock music had risen anew, high and mighty, filling all the waterways to the brim, careening off cliffs and pushing rocks down to the valley in an unrepentant surge.
It had been a relative drought just before that last torrential storm; in the early 2000s when U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Dave Matthews Band dominated the radio and Rock music was being kept on life support by just a few bands. Suddenly the layered guitars and sardonic smirk of The Strokes crashed against the alien ambience of Radiohead’s synthetic sound, and sometimes the big guitars and muddy caterwauling of White Stripes would rush into the fray as well. We started to see really innovative new music made of fusions from these early 2000s stalwarts and it was becoming more and more exciting. Some of these newfangled fusions included groups like TV on the Radio, Interpol, Arcade Fire, and The Killers.
The next day the ground warmed up more, and the sun became whole and concentrated, accelerating the snowmelt and making the streams and rivers rage with even more intensity. New forms of Rock were being created with crossovers we hadn’t imagined yet like Southern Rock with the Punk layerings of The Strokes, which begot a group like Kings of Leon. Big Rock n’ Roll sounds, along with the new production technology in the 21st Century, led to all sorts of Synth Rock groups like The Rapture, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, LCD Soundsystem, and the far less dancy but far more indie quirk of Wolf Parade. Folk music and Electronica created strange yet beautiful children in groups like Animal Collective, Four Tet, and Yeasayer, which were tagged with the curious subgenre moniker of Freak Folk. Then we had just real quality referential bands, almighty throwbacks, that were so brazen and unhinged from the torrential energy being felt downstream. Bands like The Black Keys, My Morning Jacket, and Arctic Monkeys weren’t reinventing the wheel, but they were doing Rock with so much swagger we couldn’t ignore.
The monsoon becomes the happening of yesterday and the surge follows gravity down the mountain so that eventually what was once a raging torrent becomes a placid stream just kind of gently running in an idle amble down to the valley. You can still see traces of the mighty thing that was Indie Rock in the mid to late 2000s by the great swaths of ground carved out from the floods, yet it’s almost like a memory: faint and faded. The source of the monsoon can probably be traced back to the days of new technology and new forms of music sharing – when digital music was burgeoning and MySpace was still a great place to discover bands and Radiohead was bypassing record labels, asking people to pay as they please. It feels like just yesterday we saw synths and reverb and newfangled production leading to brilliant Indie albums like Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes (2004) or Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009). Those are the albums that carved the path to today’s Indie Rock.
Nowadays I’m just not sure how vigorous that source flows – it may be more like a slowly drying spring that trickles and eeks unassumingly down to a small meandering stream. Whether this stream makes it down to a main channel (or a mainstream…. get it) is fairly certain. However, it’s the state of that arrival right now, as well as in the future, that is uncertain. I chose not to say anything more dramatic, such as toying with the notion one day it might not make its way down to join the rest of popular music, because let’s face it, Rock music will live on for a long long time and remain popular for a good portion of the population for decades to come. There will be novel and notable entries, reinventions and reincarnations, and it certainly won’t die like Disco.
However, I dare say that it might end up falling the way of Jazz music; slowly becoming less popular and eventually falling into the deep groove of back-alley kitsch and speakeasy exclusive. Jazz is one of my favorite forms of music, one that I hold onto dearly, but it doesn’t change the reality that it’s more of a niche now and produces far less popular and noteworthy albums than half a century ago. Jazz and Blues had a heyday that is very focused and well-defined. Whereas Rock n’ Roll has had an erratic and interesting path where it has slipped in and out of potency – rising tall and heady from storms like the 60s British Invasion or the early 90s Grunge and then slipping back down into a less remarkable current. Although I will still insist (and am probably wrong) that the early 2000s will mark the last great storm for popular Rock n’ Roll. Nowadays, popular music follows the path of a Pop version of EDM as well as R&B, Rap, and Hip-Hop. Current Rock n’ Roll mostly falls under the umbrella category of Indie Rock – a very broad genre tag for what is certainly an elusive and multi-faceted form of Rock n’ Roll. I think the point is Indie Rock is not pervasive in Popular Culture, and Top 40 radio, a shell of itself made hollow by the catered consumerism of Spotify, Soundcloud, and Apple Music, only showcases versions of Rock that are shameless re-treads of Classic Rock (uh-hum, Greta Van Fleet) or cloying crap-fests like Mumford & Sons or Imagine Dragons.
From many people’s vantage points, the innovative sounds of Rock come with less frequency, and the unbridled promise is rarely felt. And I know it’s not just me looking at things myopically, because it has been confirmed by several other people I have talked to, this confirmation of the state of Rock n’ Roll today. That is why I get all the more excited when I do arrive upon something I think is really innovative and fantastic in Indie Rock. I always hope it’s the start of a new storm, because I want to see those days again when Indie Rock is a raging torrent.
After that long-winded and overwrought introduction, I call upon one of those groups/artists that is keeping me excited. In steps the band Car Seat Headrest, the brainchild of Will Toledo (what a great name for a Rocker!). The band originally hails from Leesburg, Virginia – a suburb of Washington D.C. – and are now based in Seattle. The album that really turned me on to this band is from 2015 (so new-ish, but still sounding very fresh today), and is called Teens of Style. Take a listen to one of the first songs on the album that really piqued my interest, “Something Soon”.
This is an ambitious album showcasing an un-tempered energy I haven’t heard in Indie Rock for a while. What’s truly unique about the sound is not the instruments or the penchant Indie use of big distorted guitars or reverb-heavy vocals, but rather the way Will Toledo uses his voice as both an offset and a syncopator inciting interludes within songs, as well as an element abridging verses. Take my favorite song from the album “Times to Die”, featured at the start of this post; this epic song showcases not only the sharp and introspective lyrical style of Toledo, but also the uncanny use of his voice as another instrument layered around guitars. I have never heard such a complex track that’s as equally raw. The lyrics are also biting – though what’s really fascinating is the voice modulation. The vocals are dubbed and interwoven throughout, reminiscent of the kind of artistry Freddie Mercury (ok, maybe a slightly better Rock name) employed with his vocals for “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
“Maud Gone” is the undisputed champion of this album – another epic song that feels more like a ballad than any other track on the album (and has faint traces of Wolf Parade on it). It’s another expertly crafted track that still feels slightly unkempt and grainy, which is a contradiction felt throughout the album. I was drawn to the disparity between the vocals and lyrics, which are erratic and full of raw purpose, and song structures that are complex and nearly “honed”. The album is capped by two big and brash tracks, “Bad Role Models….” and “Oh Starving”, both showcasing Toledo’s songwriting abilities. The album has that early and upstart quality to it even though Toledo appears to be a bit of a veteran of self-released material. The band is still very young, making it all the more astonishing to discover this was the first Matador Label release after eight self-released albums.
Car Seat Headrest’s proceeding album, Teens of Denial (2016), was also a fantastic album, albeit less raw and far more polished. It lacked the same manic energy as Teens of Style, which I think will go down in the canon of great Indie Rock albums. I still have their other albums playing quite frequently in the headphones. The song I keep playing off of the Teens of Denial album is “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales”, another epic song with complicated structure and endearing lyrics.
I am looking forward to hearing the future releases of Car Seat Headrest including their most recent Twin Fantasy (2017), a re-recorded version of an earlier album they self-released. Although I’m not sure if Car Seat Headrest has the type of earth-shattering Rock sound that will inspire others, or encourage others to emulate, I think a band like Car Seat Headrest gives me hope that Rock n’ Roll still has a pulse, will continue to innovate and hopefully grow, with unique and visionary artists like Will Toledo and the entire Car Seat Headrest ensemble.
