The best is noise
Why do so many modern bands insist on sounding like shit?
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: "We need this to sound like it's coming out of a busted boombox, OK?"
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The popularity of a song has seldom been tied to the amount of funds available to record it. What’s changed now, with the full cultural vastness of 20th-century media available at our collective Google-tips, is the general public’s fascination with records that sound like shit. During the last few years, acts like Times New Viking, No Age, and Wavves have been courting buzz by releasing records that teenage garage bands from the 1960s may well have sent back to the pressing plant with notes wondering what the hell went wrong.
More than a few of the popular rock records of the last five years sound like they were recorded in abandoned warehouses, then slathered in fuzz and reverb so soupy it renders the vocals, drums, and guitars into a cavernous mess. With the subcultural stardom of lo-fi punk savant Jay Reatard and glut of self-recorded albums by fellow tape-hiss-courting young turks landing satellite radio airplay and big festival gigs, the commercial legitimacy of music created with sub-par resources has never been less in doubt. It gives a whole new meaning to that immortal RIAA maxim, “Home Taping Is Killing The Music Business.”
Tonight's Mohawk bill offers an excellent chance to see this phenomenon up close through Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and Vivian Girls, two acts that represent the essential extremes of lo-fi’s sonic palette. While Pink has his own considerable charisma, Vivian Girls are the favored party-starters: Recasting the lovelorn girl-group stylings of The Shangri-Las as basement-muffled punk rock, the Brooklyn trio are no strangers to feedback, but they still manage to harmonize like angels. Fairly staid live performers, the Vivs mine the sort of music made for house parties, but it remains to be seen what kind of presence they’ll bring to a stage of Mohawk’s size. Nonetheless, despite their studied aloofness and the walls of fuzz obfuscating them, Vivian Girls’ hooks are the kind that jump out and grab an audience.
On the opposite end of the "shitgaze" spectrum, L.A.’s Ariel Pink (née Ariel Rosenberg) makes few, if any, concessions to listenability whatsoever. (In an early interview, he revealed that his first recordings were of his parents’ fax machine, which should give you some idea of his influences.) Rosenberg’s releases, particularly those in the Haunted Graffiti series, are remarkably self-contained aural worlds of smothered four-track orchestration, with tinny synths and gothic guitar chime adorning A.M. radio melodies and his own incomprehensible crooning. Pink’s “hit” albums with the Haunted Graffiti, The Doldrums and House Arrest, are impressive feats of sonic alchemy, but it would be impossible to replicate their otherworldly, third-generation cassette qualities in a live setting. Indeed, Pink is notorious for shambolic, unrehearsed shows, but the word on the street is that Pink is trying to clean up his act and his sound for a wider audience. In any event, this show is the only place you’ll be able to find the Grandes Exitos Greatest Hits tour-only double CD (unless you would rather, you know, download it), so this might be the right time to see him.
Consciously or not, in terms of texture and other sonic touchstones, it’s remarkable how closely the recordings by these and the other aforementioned artists resemble landmark punk recordings by The Wipers, Chrome, and those weird, early Pavement singles. In fact, it’s hard not to believe that all this fuzz and scuzz isn’t some semiconscious reference to that mid-'80s tape-trading subculture, when underground music carried an earned sense of ownership. The embrace of that lo-fi aesthetic—and no matter how it's actually recorded, "lo-fi" is an aesthetic—references those classic records which, thanks to nostalgic fetishization, have recently reached a far wider audience than they did during their natural lifespan.
But does that mean their influence means less now? Depending on your point of view, the Internet has either opened up whole new worlds of sound, or it's cheapened everything with instant gratification. This holds true for a lot of things besides music, of course. (RIP, "swinger" scene.) But more importantly, is adopting a deliberately abrasive sound a genuine artistic statement, or is it just a marketing technique? Tonight offers the chance to see and decide for yourself. If you can stand the noise, that is.
