Emergence of a Paradigm: We Could Use Somebody

Band Of Skulls Resurrects The Rave-Up Of Yesteryear With The Help Of Incendiary Fornication

Quiet morning. Calm. The drivers swept off their boots and went out only thirty-five minutes late and one telemarketer out of five showed up. Time to grind. Radio is on. Yes, that old-fangled gizmo with the knobs, a straight ghetto blaster. "Bottle of red, bottle of white." Alice is slingin' hash in the kitchen and I'm biting nails that are not there, open cuticles, itching but shaking less than usual, wishing I had some sunny side up eggs and a hashbrown, maybe a full pot of black coffee, as the flutes whistle a tune that eludes a generation. Or maybe not. I'm perplexed. "Bottle of red, bottle of white," would settle for one or the other in this sweat box, this hell hole, this Industrial Purgatory. But at leas there's the radio.

And I'm wondering what it looks like in Cleveland on this damp orange morning. What's poppin' at Eleven Double-O Rock N Roll Boulevard? "He can really play that piano," I told a friend.

"It all depends on your appetite," he countered.

"It's taste," I said. "I wonder where the real musik went. Why can't any of the children pick up an instrument and make something other than sullen carbon from the last fifteen years of gloom and doom? Certainly the old fogies knew how to make despair and heartbreak more palatable, more artistic, more rewarding and cathartic. Why have we arrived at such a narrow impasse? What has happened to Amerika? Does it have anything to do with that righteous nutbag Phil Spector? He used to drink from a chalice and refuse to let punk rockers exit the gates of his manse until the Sound was coursing through them. Now he's the one who can't get through the bars." And now some Buffalo Springfield. "There's something happenin' here/What it is ain't exactly clear." "Do you have the answers?" I beseeched my friend. "Do you? Do you have the answers? Help."

"To hell with that," my friend howled. "Music is better now than ever!" He went on to list the full echelon of ass-kicking modern music maestros: Dresden Dolls, Nine Inch Nails, Beck, Black Moth Super Rainbow, The Mars Volta, etc. And he concluded it with "That Ray Lemanteague motherfucker that the girls love so."

He cut right to the core because, of course, he was right. And his own words, the reason I was so jaded was because ignorance is bliss or, more precisely, knowledge weighs more than stupidity. "Because you know of music's potential, you're more disgusted with popular music than most folks."

"Indeed," I said. There is melodious music still being produced but in such short order that it renders the industry all but completely ersatz and shrink-wrapped. The Killers are not given their just desserts and "Sex is on Fire" couldn't possibly be topped, at least not without fully embracing the kind of 70's power-sludge that this generation is terrified of.

Kids today won't swallow a 70's renaissance because they've grown up thinking it was Oldies, a horrible fact that puts me in cold sweats when I hear something like "Poker Face" being played nineteen times in a 12-hour day. And Rock is in absencia unless you have an iPod.

Rock radio is a dinosaur whose fossils have been triturated by the Doc Martens of punks who have converted to Avril Lavigne status in order to turn a profit for gluttons who run them down to the bone on exhausting world tours that amount to gas money and Red Bulls.

No wonder they have nothing in them but generic drudge and tired dirges about girls who grind on their girlfriends. They are fatigued and so is the junior listener.

Oh but what's this? Cameo on the FM? "Word up." Word down. This is Prince. Yes! The last bastion of funky mojo majesty still flooding the fluorescent lit environs of American industry. This will get the grinders grinding and the knives slitting. It gives you momentum. Not like Atreyu or a Sugar Ray reunion or whatever bogus hokum they're passing off on these poor ignorant blood simple shits now.

Puscifer isn't mainstream; Black Moth will never reach the lobes of someone raised on a steady diet of scenester bullshit. These kids never heard of Journey or Alice Cooper or Jello Biafra or even Lou Reed. No wonder "Sawdust" results were abysmal for The Killers. The reverb is foreign, the auto-tune is Supreme and ubiquitous.

We need to smack them with a paddle across the lobes, send something sweet and nasty into those eustachian tubes. That's the only way the regular tikes will ever break the cycle of two beat repetitions. That is why I have teamed with someone who uses polyrhythms for my own musical endeavors (www.myspace.com/sstevenmyes) and why people like Doctor Mudbath and Manburger Surgical are doing everything short of climbing inside an amplifier and rolling it down a rocky incline in order to make music more interesting.

But Rock is never dead, only sleeping off a bad hangover. And there's some stuff out there right now that could turn it all around. Remember The Distillers? They had a song called "Beat Your Heart Out" with the bridge, "Stab it out, stab it out." Hot chick lead singer Brody Dalle is on her own and she's got some friends she can trust and together they call themselves Spinnerette and their music can make you wet in so many ways, the apotheosis of certifiable Rock N Roll.

And then there's Band of Skulls, a UK outfit with an LP out on Shangri-La that rattles and thrashes with the same refined galvanizing chutzpah (because I said so) that the decrepit shitters used to get from top notch acts like The Who, The Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, etc. Somewhere someone is going to fashion a stake to drive through my heart just for having the bristly balls to compare a new band to something so sacred, but fuck idols and fuck you, that's my stance, chief!

Franz Ferdinand brought back danceteria New Wave jams with the expert help of The Killers, The Post Service and Death Cab made Dance music cool and smart. So why couldn't raggedy 70's-style rock experience a proper Renaissance? I think it has, I'm banking on it, and what I've got invested is my heart, my soul and my eardrums. The first investment: Band of Skulls.

You hear "Blood" and you're right there—gassing up the Dunebuggy and going out on a Vision Quest, gums full of little chunks of cactus filament. "Honest" is every bit as beautiful as anything from Black Happy Day, an obscure dark gospel chamber band, or Plumerai, the moody avant-rockers, both of whom deserve to be reaching more lobes. Same as Band of Skulls. They're bringing the vroomvroom! And played in tandem with Spinnerette you've got a soundtrack for some praying mantis estrus, music that gets you down in it, rasslin' in the lubricious multi-cum-muck-vomit, groovin' to the Grandfather clock as you while away hours with all five on repeat, head buried in a pleasure pouch, music yolkin' you to munch on the majestic clitoris or manstaff or what have you, for two straight hours or however long you can enjoy this glorious line-up of power-thrust highwire music magic. Some say a half hour and they don't deserve these songs to be in their possession. Ears shaken free of cilia, eyes weary but wonky and head deep in wet brain with waves smacking against the hypothalamus as your muscles twitch and your toes tap and you fucking lose your shit.

This is especially true of the first half of Band of Skulls' disc and damn near all of what Brody and Co. have in their sonic cauldron. And the best example of this in the mainstream is the aforementioned Kings of Leon single. "The dark of the alley/The light of the day/The head while I'm driving/I'm driving/Soft lips are open/Knuckles are pale/Feels like you're dying/You're dying." And then the human crescendo: "YooooOOOOOOU...Your Sex Is On FIRE! ConSUUUUUUMED With What's To TRANSPIRE!!!!!" And then it drops back down, we're in low gear, "Hot as a fever/Rattling bones/I could just taste it/Taste it."

I can taste it too. We all can and that's what makes it legendary. Akin to The Who's "Reign on Me," in vocal modulation, melody and execution, "Sex on Fire" is what we'll call an "orgiastic insomniac anthemic," a power ballad for the indigo child hooked on moonlight, who just can't get enough and is addicted to the cold air rushing into the open mouth as the head dangles on the door. Someone once described a certain Bob Marley joint as, "A percolating rave-up." "Sex on Fire," and almost everything on Band of Skulls' and Spinnerette's respective discs, could be considered just this.

It's there, it's out there, and I was unfair to doubt, even for a millisecond, that they weren't on the job. Let's hope Kings of Leon and Band of Skulls can hook a tour together so a more progressive sound can flourish on a larger scale. Or maybe I'm full of shit and you just can't read my ppppoker face.