Greensboro’s The Kneads are a band haunted by ghosts of the
past… specifically early to mid ‘90s indie ghosts. And that’s fine by me, because for all that
era’s resurgence in popularity, I’ve heard few new bands actually continuing to
mine the vein.
Which is not to say they’re derivative. It might sound like they wear their
influences on their sleeves. People (even
their press kit) cite influences like local heroes Superchunk, as well as DC
post-hardcore band Fugazi. I also hear Midwestern
acts like Poster Children and Braid, and another great DC band, Jawbox. But these can’t rightfully be called influences. Members of The Kneads were playing in indie bands
of some note back then (going back to The Raymond Brake), so they were really
more contemporaries. Now, with The
Kneads, they’re just continuing to do what they’ve always done.
The thing about “indie guitar rock” is, it’s a vein with
plenty more left to tap. When done well
(and The Kneads do it well), it’s not just thrashing of guitars with a melody buried
in the din. Within the simple
guitar-bass-drums dynamic (here, sometimes guitar-guitar-drums), there’s ample
opportunity for the unexpected: complex instrumental
and vocal interplay, surprising chord and tempo changes, etc. And the unexpected, for me, is what makes
music worth listening to.
Their debut CD, Letting
You Let Me Down (great title, btw), on Durham’s PotLuck, is full of dense,
dissonant guitars, with unanticipated little twists and turns embedded
throughout. The first cut, North and South of Temperament, is a
perfect example. The bridge slows and
slips you into a completely different melody -- almost a different song entirely
-- before resuming the driving hook that opened the song. Call-and-response lyrics here, and in other
tunes like Persistence Changes Everything,
add yet another layer. I do hear Fugazi
in Persistence and a few other places,
but the similarity is more vocal (courtesy bassist/guitarist Michael Joncas)
than musical. No, check that. Maybe also in the jazz-ish complexity of the
instrumentation. While there are more
straightforward head-bobbers like Jaded
and Rejuvenated and Toto Recall (and
more great titles), they always have a more-than-par-for-the-course intricacy,
often via syncopated rhythms from drummer Joe Garrigan.
Toto Recall and Microcelebrity visit the music scenes of
yesterday and today, respectively. The
former flashes back to the summer of ’95, post-adolescence, and self-doubt,
twisting Tom Petty’s discontented lyric into the more open-ended, even
optimistic (?), “start draggin’ my heart
around”. It then pleasantly ventures
into a little psychedelic spacey-ness near the end. Microcelebrity
bemoans the current crop of “pseudo-indierock” bands trying to claim the
overused mantle. With indie having
long-since become a buzz-word, guitarist Joel Darden laments singers that have “no
virtues to extoll / just cheap-ass hood-rat dime-store rock’n’roll” and have “read
the Pitchfork poll”. Or… is he one of
them? Self-doubt, it seems, is always
there.
At the end of Microcelebrity,
Interpol-esque guitars devolve into still more spacey sounds, before the space
theme becomes lyrically overt in I Miss
Your Underdog Days. I must say this one
had me flashing back to Poster Children’s
Junior Citizen, with all the mission control terminology, though it’s more relationship than music metaphor (“Did you wake up in the thermosphere?
It don’t matter, get your ass back here!”). Fistful
of Contradictions brings it way down with an almost experimental number, answering-machine
“vocals” struggling from underneath acoustic strumming and chiming electric. Then the album returns to the rawk with its driving
closer, the Fugazi-meets-Smashing Pumpkins Frames.
Of course, there’s yet another surprise at the end… and not
just because it’s a hidden track (and, due to the chorus of “Not gonna let you let me down”, I
assume the title track). It veers WAY
left into a twangy, reverb-laden, light-pop vibe, and it’s a wonderful way to (actually)
close the album. Don’t touch your dial until
it ends!
Overall, Letting You
Let Me Down is a nice bridge between hardcore & indie-rock, from a band
clearly schooled in these genres, but smart enough to mix it up throughout to
keep it interesting.
