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I’m taking that phrase from John Cale, the legendary Velvet Underground cofounder and recent Charli XCX muse, who used it as the title of his 1970s solo debut, a sharp turn into rock balladry following his departure from the avant-garde lodestone. For him, “vintage violence” meant entering into spaces that might feel nostalgic for someone like him — pastoral, country-flavored rock, stories of colonialist exploration and homesickness — and add dashes of surreal mayhem, making them weird enough to be questionable. Cale is also a favorite of Lex Walton, a New York-based multimedia artist whose new album on Sub Pop, Ultimate Love Forever, gallops through the timeline of arty New York bar rock from Warhol’s time to the indie sleaze era and beyond. A comment she made in an interview with music scribe Larry Fitzmaurice got me thinking about how many young bands are engaging in vintage violence to renew the relevance of older musical styles. “It's a fool's errand to try to make something meaningful by speaking outside of the vernacular of our time,” Walton said, explaining that her politically charged, confrontational songs are inspired by pop’s ability to engage with ideas as they’re forming in the zeitgeist, even though they’re also clearly connected to well-worn styles. For Walton, purposeful awareness is key. “Something I've tried to do from the start is, why would I set out making this kind of song when I know that the song exists?” she said. “I can hear it in my head, and I should just follow it wherever it wants to go.”
Walton’s words gave me a framework to comprehend another new record I find bewitching — Lightspheres On Their Way by Lily Seabird. Based in Burlington, Vt., Seabird has played bass with like-minded songwriters Greg Freeman and Liz Cooper and released two albums for Lame-O records before this one, developing her sound in community with musicians connected to both the indie and jam band scenes. The sound Seabird has developed, a loose but dynamically intense blend of folk, psychedelic and proto-punk elements, has clear touchstones: certainly Neil Young, and her stated favorite indie weirdos Dean and Gene Ween (“they do what they want, which I find really inspiring”), fellow New England dirtbags Dinosaur Jr., and, in the delicacy with which she modulates her music’s heaping sound, Elliott Smith.
What’s so memorable about Lightspheres is the way Seabird finds herself within those reference points. Her voice does a lot to make Lightspheres distinctive. A pensive drawl that often gives way to a piping wail, it’s an instrument that dwells in a feminine space until it rejects any confines to become feral and genderless. The freedom within Seabird’s singing is countered and supported by the precision of her storytelling. Songs like “Portal to the Past” and the ultimate road song “Blackstar” — which, sorry Phoebe Bridgers, has the best opening line of the year with “Vomiting in the Whole Foods, I heard that the end of the world was soon” — evoke decades of forays into the outer edges of pastoral rock. Listening, I thought of the band that introduced me to the Velvet Underground, the Dream Syndicate, who smeared up ‘60s rock paradigms for slacker Gen X. Seabird, who is 27, is more earnest and forthright. Her style of vintage violence runs on love. She honors her sources, but as an inheritor with her own priorities, never gets stuck under a shadow.
If Seabird moves through clearly demarcated territories into her own uncharted space, English band Westside Cowboy (pictured above) gobbles them up like a bunch of trail runners snarfing Gu to maintain their nutrition. Only three years from meeting as music school students, this raucous ensemble has won attention for its ability to rock at breakneck speeds while hitting a sweet spot with melodies that could make a fan cry into their pint. Drawing connections across genres in lyrics that reflect a crush on both indie’s sardonicism and country’s splendor (one song on its debut album It Goes On is called “Dobro,” though it sounds like the Velvets’ “What Goes On” taken to the Hacienda; another, “Big Wheels,” slightly mangles the first line from Bob Dylan’s Western classic “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” over some Pixies-style chord changes), Westside Cowboy happily joins in the centuries-long exchange between British and American musicians.
The band coined the deliberately silly term “Britainicana” to describe its patchwork approach, though it’s now saying that was just a joke. In fact, the big-hearted It Goes On (oh look, Velvets again) clearly fit into a roots-rock lineage, but not one that includes strict preservationists. Westside Cowboys taps into the intercontinental sound chased by British Invasion loving Southerners like Big Star, punk disciples like the Replacements and by English and Australian cowboys like the Mekons and the Go-Betweens. Rock’s essential drive to build something new with every performance dominates the band’s approach; the main point of a Westside Cowboy song is the interaction among its four members, who cowrite, share vocals and prefer to meld their parts within a furiously escalating whole instead of making room for solo show-off moments. As with the forebears I’ve mentioned above, Westside Cowboy wreaks vintage violence for fun, as a way to zealously engage with a whole grab bag of influences at once. The band’s somewhat gnomic lyrics enhance the music’s immediacy, making listening to them a close-contact experience instead of one centered in storytelling. This is a band that will make you ask yourself, isn’t Pavement a country band, anyway? It’s always fun when a young band takes up a lineage and tosses it fully into the air. A little mayhem can carry us forward. |
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More stories from NPR Music |
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Olivia Rodrigo’s women-led Daisy Chain Fields music festival, featuring an intergenerational line-up of artists like Stevie Nicks, Chappell Roan and Sarah McLachlan, debuted last weekend. Writer Jenn Pelly went to the festival and wrote that its political mission was front and center, while Morning Edition’s Leila Fadel spoke to Rodrigo about how the festival came to be.
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The Grammy-winning jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson died on Wednesday at the age of 70. In an obituary for NPR Music, WRTI’s Nate Chinen writes that Wilson’s deep, dark contralto and casual disregard for musical category made her one of the most arresting and influential jazz vocalists of the last 40 years.”
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Harry Styles is currently performing a 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, his only American tour dates to promote his last album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. That decision, plus climbing ticket prices, attracted mixed reactions from fans. Reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento talked to attendees outside the show to find how far they traveled to see Harry, and how much they paid for those coveted tickets.
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On All Songs Considered, Robin Hilton and Sheldon Pearce play new music from the producer Dahi, Jorja Smith and Emily A. Sprague.
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Last week brought a new album, Leap Life, from the multi-hyphenate artist Saul Williams, but also the surprise, long awaited collaborative LP Before The World Blows from Erykah Badu and the Alchemist. Rodney Carmichael writes that both of these new offerings “are out to spark something revolutionary, but it starts with deep internal work first.”
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A few things making me violently happy |
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I stumbled upon the late Ed Ward’s review of Vintage Violence while writing this piece, and you should read it. Kick in the pants.
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My dear partner in podcasting Daoud Tyler-Ameen stepped out of his usual editor’s role to pen this smart and heartwarming tribute to the band Martha and its classic album Blisters.
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Do you leave it all on the dance floor? Mixmag Asia interviewed a DJ and doctoral researcher at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute about why that feels so good.
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It came out in March, but I just recently discovered the album Bränn min jord (Burn My Soil), from the Swedish artist Fågelle, who returned to her home in the rural province of Halland and spent three years talking to elders, exploring villages, making field recordings and singing in the forest to create a deeply immersive and personal travelog. Fans of Björk will like it.
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Girl Bands on the Criterion Channel this month!
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