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So, I picked up Straylight Run’s debut album today. I considered it a hedged crapshoot, meaning that at a $11.95-style bargain CD rate, I’m looking at just over $1 a song, and I have preobtained knowledge that one of the songs (“Existentialism on Prom Night”) is probably worth $5 of that. Straylight Run is “emo”, but a little better than what we currently have to hold back vomit over on MTV lately. It’s harder for the most part, and more personal (less whiny and manufactured “California-style” vocals that Blink 182 popularized over the last painful few years).
The goal here, then, is that at least five songs need to be worth about $1 apiece. The loftier goal, we might say, is to see if Straylight defines a movement in music to rival, or at least palely imitate, the revolution that true 90’s alt rock waged against the glam rock and death metal of the extended 80’s period (which reached into the early 90’s).
My perspective on the issue of alternative rock bears some extra enumeration before I go into my opinion of Straylight. Alt rock was beautiful in its ugliness, and successful for its broadness. At one end was grunge, the king of which was Alice in Chains. This opinion is given some extra credibility by the fact that I’m not a big AiC fan. Grunge was dirty and didn’t care what you thought about it. Grunge was going on in Seattle. AiC was great at what they did, but Pearl Jam (also a Pacific Northwest band) did it right. They were a showered up Alice in Chains, and they dominated a “college rock” kind of scene, while not being sellouts. Lots of hemp necklaces in their crowds. Awesome band, great fan base.
The other end was an evolved form of purist rock. I feel Stone Temple Pilots was the picture of this side (or at least a prime example of it, my STP bias is notably more pro than my bias for Alice in Chains). This side was an answer to Guns n’ Roses. Candlebox was also here, as was Soundgarden. This was hard rock (I believe some don’t even consider this stuff alternative), but it wasn’t self-centered. There was emotion, and not just raw anger. Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” is a beautiful example of this. Candlebox (which even followed the guitar solo format of an 80’s rock song) captured hearts and minds with “Far Behind,” which is a sort of power ballad / lament that typifies how a fairly retarted 80’s concept like “power ballad” could turn into a beautiful form of hard rock expression. Smashing Pumpkins came in and did…Smashing Pumpkins stuff. They were unique and beautiful.
The fountainhead of all this was Nirvana. Not really saying I’m a big Kurt Cobain fan, but they started the entire movement. Watch the video to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It was a big F-You to the class system of American schools. Headbanging to “Teen Spirit” wasn’t about devil worship or playing loud music. It was nonconformist.
Of course, if you get enough nonconformers in the room they will start conforming to each other. This happened, and bastard children of the movement were born. Mostly poorly-constructed parodies of successes like Green Day’s 1994 Dookie album put together to exploit the format laid down by creative forces. Nirvana was hard to imitate, but Green Day wasn’t. Neither was Matchbox 20. Or the Wallflowers. Or Oasis. Or 311.
Blink 182 came from Green Day. The pop-friendly voice of Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 started showing up everywhere. Everybody else got copied, too.
Green Day was really to blame here, because they brought in a sort of skateboard punk thing that ended up getting really perverted. This strikes me as when Mountain Dew started with their “extreme” stuff. 311 started the alt rock style of rap rock, a la Beastie Boys. This spawned all kinds of morons, most notably Limp Bizkit. Luckily, we got Linkin Park out of the deal, but it was a painful birthing.
Rap rock and punk bridged, offshot, and merged into emo. Staind was (and maybe still is?) hard emo. Emo has really sucked, because frankly I don’t care about your girl problems. I don’t need to hear about them. I also don’t need to hear that your parents were abusive. If you want to package those feelings into useful songs that have a beat and melody to them that I enjoy, I might open up to you and enjoy your music.
Which is why I bought the Straylight album. I had a feeling, based upon my prior hearing of “Existentialism on Prom Night”, that they were doing something with the genre, that they were packaging their girl problems into a form that was artful.
I was correct. I’m not going to be purchasing any Straylight Run t-shirts or anything, but it’s good. Appreciably good. They have a piano-playing female in the group, which was a great pick. She has a great, personal voice. I wish she would replace the chick in Caedmon’s Call, though I don’t know if she would want to be in a Christian band. Songwriting isn’t on par with early Dave Matthews or other great writers from last decade, but at this point I will take what I can get.
It’s my opinion that the day we see good songwriting in emo it will stop being emo. When your music is named for its expression of emotion, it must not have good lyrics. Emotional content in rock music should be a reliable, unstated assumption. Unfortunately, we have left the realm of unstated assumptions. The fact is, music keeps getting worse, and there is no hope in sight.
Straylight is a good execution of a bad format. But I’m glad I bought the album.