Now taking bets on when 90s revivalism will work…
[Video][Website]
[4.25]
Jer Fairall: Plodding, lethargic grunge of the sort I had little use for twenty years ago, never mind now. If this is what 90s nostalgia is gonna sound like, we’re in for a few years that’ll last as long as this song feels.
[3]
Brad Shoup: This is what happens when 1991 is your Year Zero.
[5]
Alfred Soto: This plods something awful, a phenomenon that turns the title from metaphor to prophecy. It’s supposed to be the opening salvo in a concept album about emo.
[4]
Iain Mew: The chiming riff sounds like Mew’s “Comforting Sounds”, but this is more like thoroughly discomforting sounds. The combination with Dylan Baldi’s reedy vocals also resembles early Radiohead, but their misery was always much more dynamic. “No Future/No Past” just goes round in hopeless circles that make its opening command to “give up” a fait accompli. Eventually Baldi strains to sound more hoarse and unpleasant and the band bring some energy, but it’s not quite worth the wait.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Reading Jonathan Bogart’s singles lists for the 90s last night, working through a decade where I first listened to rock and roll seriously, I was reminded of how much I love the Smashing Pumpkins and that much of what I previously thought to credit to the Pixies or Nirvana or Punk’s Women’s Auxiliary actually came from Billy Corgan. We might as well add this to the pile, now that I’m in a generous and nostalgic mood.
[7]
John Seroff: Perhaps unsurprisingly, when you mix Yuck and Radiohead, you get Yuckhead.
[3]
Michaela Drapes: No, really, the youth of today don’t need a Pavement-by-proxy facilitated by too many stoned listening sessions to Radiohead and Interpol.
[0]
Sabina Tang: I have to give this credit for being on-brand: it’s a great sonic representation of the clothes in Urban Outfitters. To wit, desaturated to a muddy shade, and overpriced for what you get.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: Corporations are people now, meaning that the video description really can say that Urban Outfitters co-produced this. Unlike their clothes, though, the metaphor fits; this is a thin, fraying and artfully grungy ripoff of better styles, with uncomfortable implications if you buy into it too much, that I’ll hate myself for not hating.
[7]
W.B. Swygart: Video co-produced by Urban Outfitters, which I think means someone at Urban Outfitters is a Katie Melua fan. The song itself is like a slightly duller, more predictable Slint, but it does the klangenwhine nicely enough.
[6]
Michelle Myers: A sprawling landscape of alt rock in broad, impressionist strokes. If you get caught up in hating the entire idea of 90s revivalism, you might miss the Recession Era Gen-Y hopelessness, the crashing cymbals like a bucket of water in the face, the Spiderland chug of the bass guitar. Dylan Baldi made the wise and timely choice to stop singing like most of his bedroom rock peers. After a few years of indie rock mostly sounding like ghosts at the bottom of a well inside a dentist’s office from the 80s, an emotionally-demonstrative non-poltergeist singer is a breath of fresh air.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: No present, either.
[3]