Rank Amateurs
Nobunny's Love Visions, Japandroids' Post-Nothing, The Beets' Spit in the Face of People Who Don't Want to Be Cool
As recently as four years ago, it had gotten difficult to find the grime in indie rock. That wasn't a bad thing, necessarily, just anomalous; a scene that had once prized the no-fi aesthetics of unpracticed bands like Royal Trux and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion had begun to skew polite.
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Forgotten in this transition is the fact that there's a genuine pleasure that comes from hearing bands whose haphazardness and unprofessionalism would either baffle or enrage large swaths of the population. I disgusted a fellow writer recently by saying I gravitated toward bands that took genuine pride in being terrible. He called that impulse "immature," and while I don't disagree, I don't exactly take it as an insult, either.
It comes down to whether you believe pop music should be the provenance of the gifted or you subscribe to the thesis that anyone can be in a band — and whether they should is beside the point.
It's somewhat easier these days to track down acts that take pleasure in that kind of lazy screwing around. Of these new trash merchants, the greatest by far is the Bay Area outfit Nobunny. Their debut, Love Visions, is a starter course in rank amateurism, blissfully out-of-tune guitars supporting giddy, grade-school melodies. It's like the lost album the New York Dolls recorded for K Records, Nobunny's snotty drawl stretched out over scuzzbucket guitars and the occasional barroom piano. Slightly more together, but not necessarily any more NPR-ready, are Vancouver's Japandroids. The guitars on Post-Nothing run in the red, as creamy as any My Bloody Valentine record. The vocals, though, are another affair: Yelped and bleated, sliding off-beat and off-key, they're full-strength adolescent id, no filter or restraint.
The guitars on The Beets' Spit in the Face of People Who Don't Want to Be Cool are thin as filament, the songs more space than sound. The vocals are swaddled in echo, but what grounds these wisp-thin songs are the sturdiness of the melodies. It's that insistent singability that allows the Beets to be as crappy as they wanna be. It's nice to know there are some bands that are too primitive even for primitivism.
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