Gorillaz bore again

NOTE: This is one of the worst takes on an album I think I've ever had. I clearly went into Plastic Beach looking for Demon Days 2 or for Blur's Think Tank 2. This record is now one of my all-time favorites. I just needed time to catch up with Damon Albarn.

Listening to the Gorillaz, the fake (or cartoon) band of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewitt, is fraught with conflict for me.

On one hand, I'm a huge fan of Blur, the Brit Pop juggernaut of which Albarn was the frontman through the '90s (and more recently for the band's one-and-done reunion last year). I also really enjoyed Albarn's The Good, The Bad and the Queen.

On the other hand, I haven't heard more than three or four hip hop albums that I've liked in the last 15 years.1 The pacing, subject matter and composition of hip hop has fallen a long way since its peak in the late 80s and early 90s. To my ears, it's hard to imagine how the music could get any worse.

So for me, the Gorillaz' new album Plastic Beach, which dabbles a great deal in hip hop, the experience is disorienting. And ultimately dull.

There's a lot worth trying to like on the Gorillaz. There's a leitmotif of experimentation that brings the Clash's Sandinista! to mind (in fact, Albarn's collaborator on The Good, The Bad and The Queen, Paul Simonon of the Clash is on this record, too).

The record's themes are also admirable. There's an undercurrent of modern angst and the perils of our disposable culture here that are current. Albarn has always worked in keen, Kinks-like social criticism dating back to Blur's earliest work. There are sound ideas behind these songs, both in composition and lyrics.

But the guest spots suggest a diversity that's really not at work here. All the songs chug along with various degrees of keys and other electronic beep and blips. The sum total sounds like Albarn at work on Garage Band. It's a thin, phony sound -- as flat and undynamic as anything I've heard recently. At it's best, the various guest vocalists are disorienting, lending the record a disjointed feel, or worse yet, the feel of a soundtrack or compilation.

For Albarn, who worked with one of the best rock and pop bands in contemporary memory, it's hard not to be disappointed in that thinness. For most American listeners, who have only heard Blur's "Song 2," a grunge parody that is as far from representative of the band's work as any single song could be, this means very little.2 But I can't help feeling like there's something missing while listening to the Gorillaz -- even in songs like "Melancholy Hill," "Plastic Beach" and "Empire Ants" that put Albarn up front (he sings without help from De La Soul or Mos Def).

No matter what, this just ain't nearly as good as Blur.

It might be unfair of me to hold Gorillaz to this standard. And perhaps there's a modernity here that I am just unable to appreciate.3 But I don't think this lives up to Albarn's great talents. It's a piece of disposable pop, as plastic as the culture he decries on the album's title track.

Footnotes:

1. Outkast's Stankonia and The Love Below, Common's Like Water for Chocolate and The Roots' Phrenology.

2. Though the British music press, where Albarn has been a genuine pop star for 20 years, has fawned over this new album, with most of the big music magazines giving it the highest praise available. Maybe they've gotten over Blur, something I can't seem to do.

3. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the similarly electronic-drenched work of fellow brit group Hot Chip. Hot Chip sounds vital to me. Full of ideas and possibilities. I don't hear that on Plastic Beach.

Is "viral" so bad?

I haven't been able to stop listening to that new OK Go album I briefly reviewed in my last post. So I went to their Web site to see if any Philly shows were in the band's future (Turns out the they're hitting Baltimore and NYC, but not Philly this April) and stumbled across a link to an op-ed by the band's singer Damian Kulash in the New York Times from a week ago.

When I wrote about the OK Go, I had hoped I could embed their new video for This Too Shall Pass. For the not-so-tech-savvy out there, youtube has avery easy function for embedding videos in blogs and other Web sites... If I had succeeded, my post on the band would have included a window where readers could easily watch the video right there without linking to another site -- in this case You Tube. But OK Go's record label EMI won't allow the band's videos (and videos by many other bands now) to be embedded.

Kulash explains how the band essentially became famous for a video it made for the song “Here It Goes Again.” The video, made for peanuts, was free advertising for the band, putting their song in front of tens of millions of viewers who might never have heard the band otherwise. It fueled audiences for a world tour and made them a profitable enterprise. EMI's decision to "cash in" on Web videos has made a similar phenomenon impossible.

From Kulash's piece:

Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

The numbers are shocking: When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account. 

Like a lot of news companies, traditional record industries can't seem to wrap their heads around new business models. So called viral distribution of digital content has destroyed a lot of the old ways of doing business. But when OK Go benefits from viral distribution, and arguably does so in a big way, the traditional record company blocks it.

In the current issue of The Atlantic, there is a story about the marketing genius of the Grateful Dead, a band that made enormous amounts of money with very little radio support. Early in its history, the band embraced the bootleg, allowing fans to record their concerts. The distribution of those bootlegs made The Dead one of the most bankable live acts of the last 40 years. Scholars now think the Dead were pioneers of marketing and business professors are eager to examine the band's extensive archives, which were recently donated to UC Santa Cruz.

I guess a band of acid-addled hippies figured out 40 years ago what corporate suits can't figure out today. You can swap audio and video files, but you can't do the same for the band's live act, it's T shirts and other goods -- things The Dead used to become one of the most successful bands in rock history. Those who want to protect the rights of that which can't be protected are going to lose out.

From Kulash again:
In these tight times, it’s no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better — though I fear it may already be too late.

I think he's right.

Winter Wonderland

So, I've been spending a lot of time indoors. As I write this, the third Blizzacane of Feb '10 is brewing overhead -- or so say our trusty weather tellers. It's poised to dump a foot or two on our heads and keep us inside for a little longer.1

I'd been spending some of this time bemoaning the fact that I haven't been hearing any good new music... I even found myself spending about half an hour with American Idol, which I can say is exactly the opposite thing someone looking for interesting new music should do. [Note to AI producers: ban the acoustic guitars. The show is already a bad karaoke parody; why make it a coffeehouse farce on top of that?]

So I had time to be a little adventurous... and to watch videos.

OK Go: Of The Blue Colour of the Sky

The first video was by an L.A. band that I've heard about but never found all that exciting: The OK Go. The OK Go are a power pop band who became famous for a youtube video that featured the band members dancing a choreographed routine on treadmills. The video was neat, but the band was not amazing. Just enjoyable pop (not that there's anything wrong with that).

So when the band's new album -- Of The Blue Colour of the Sky -- came out this past January, I didn't run out to get it. But as I was perusing some of the new music videos on demand, I came across this one for the new single, "This Too Shall Pass." I thought immediately that the video was just aonther gimmick, but they actually re-recorded a live marching band doing the song. The all-in-one-shot video is also brilliant. I had to hear the album. I did. And it is very good.

For this record, OK Go brought in Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann and the sound is a quantum leap from Ok GO of old. Imagine the Lips, Prince and Beck getting together to cut an album and you'll get the idea behind Of The Blue Colour of the Sky. Some of the material, particularly "End Love" and "White Knuckles," sounds so much like vintage Prince, I think it would fool nearly anybody in a blind listen. And it's not just the music. Frontman Damian Kulash's falsetto and regular singing voice here is a dead ringer for Prince in the New Revolution era.

The key to this album is this: The band, particularly in their videos, come off a little too hip --perhaps even making an album of Prince-like dance party music is nothing more than an ironic goof off. But I don't get that feel. The material here sounds sincere. And the sounds Fridmann gets from the band are awesome. The music is dance, but the arrangements and sounds are not conventional. This is not another rock band pulling a Maroon 5 makeover for record sales. This is neat, at times challenging music that also happens to be danceable.

Next time I throw a dance party in my living room, I'm just going to put on Of The Blue Colour of the Sky.

Hot Chip: One Life Stand

The other band I found is Hot Chip. I'm really late to this UK dance electro group, which has had a string of top-10 singles and a Mercury nomination for its 2006 album The Warning. But dance electro is not something I usually go for (Though I liked Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers during the 6 months that electronica was popular).

Last weekend, I stumbled across a 16-minute clip of the band playing its hits since The Warning on the concert.tv on demand channel. My first impression of the band -- five guys who look like extras from Napoleon Dynamite in a line and all but one behind a a small keyboard or drum machine stand (one guy had a keyboard, but also had a Fender Telecaster strapped to his chest) -- was that the whole thing had to be a joke.

As the band launched into their first song -- the ridiculously catchy "Over and Over" from The Warning -- all five members started jerking to the thumping rhythm, as if only the necessity playing their keys and twiddling their knobs was keeping them from breaking out in a full-on display of hedonism. It was a really wierd thing to see. Did you really need five guys to make this music? But the more I listened, and watched, the more I became fascinated. This band was really something. And unlike a lot of duos and other electro acts, these five guys really were collaborating.

I got copies of The Warning and the new album One Life Stand, also released last month. Both are really pretty enjoyable. Hot Chip has an antiquated sound. The blips and chirps and Casio tones of the band recall Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, New Order and any other number of '80s electro bands. The synths sound like synths. The drum machine like a drum machine. Even the guitar is processed and digitized. The overall experience is at once timeless and contemporary. This is a new band doing things you haven't quite heard before but in ways that are familiar (if that's possible).2

After listening to both, and comparing the two, One Life Stand seems constrained. The single, "One Life Stand," like "Over and Over" is a great song, a pulsing rhythm with a very memorable chorus. It's dance pop excellence. It's the kind of thing that Hot Chip seems to excel at: The undeniably hooky song that you can't get out of your head -- the kind of thing you'd love to hear at a dance club.3 The album opener, "Thieves in the Night" is a real standout, too. In ten years, these guys will have an amazing greatest hits collection.

But as a whole, the album doesn't seem to hold together quite as well. At times the tracks are too slow or too long, the beats not quite killer or plaintive, high crooning of singer Alexis Taylor is too strained, too like a choir boy. In the end, there just isn't the energy of performance that seemed so apparent on the collection of performances from The Jools Holland show.

Still, this is an album is worth having, and I suspect it might grow on me with more listens. This is a band doing really interesting things -- taking a rock combo aesthetic towards electro dance music and coming up with really compelling music that requires closer listening than the average booty shaker. This is a band, after all, that can do this kind of music live, and do so in a way that is really exciting, mixing things up, improvising... the kind of thing that this sort of music so often lacks. Hot Chip is likely to give us more in years to come.

Footnotes:

1. 24 hours later as I finish this, the Blizzacane has mostly fizzled.

2. Since the '90s, the trend in guitars has been for the vintage 60s Fenders and Gibsons with little room for else. The sound of those instruments, the pure tone of the '60s were (are) musts. The pointy Japanese guitars that everybody played in the '80s were relegated to heavy metal and little more. Like the Old fenders, I suspect that the synth gear used by Hot Chip has a vintage value. The sounds are certainly vintage. The '80s were, after all, 30 years ago now.

3. There's always been an imaginary dance club in my head that plays stuff like Hot Chip, Chemical Brothers, Modest Mouse and Franz Ferdinand. I've never been to one like it.

The ascent of Taylor Swift: the rise of safe sex, country style

I was going to contemplate the Who's Super Bowl appearance in a post titled "The Who & The Super Bowl: Perfect Together," but I realized the sentence said all I needed. What more is there to write about the perfect combination of a juggernaut arena sport and the biggest, loudest arena band of all time? Column done.

Instead, I thought I'd explore something completely different: The dazzling super-fame and success of Taylor Swift.

I'm late to this party. And I have to admit that I have been exposed to virtually none of Taylor Swift's music before I set out to write this. In fact, I went on a brief listening bender of Swift to get a feel for her oeuvre (That's a line that would make Beavis snicker for sure). But, the thing that's interesting about Taylor Swift to me is that I suspect -- in fact I'm pretty sure -- that her music has virtually nothing to do with her success of the last year in which she's won more major music awards in a shorter period than any artist, ever.1

First, let's just assume for the sake of argument that in the world of country music Taylor Swift is really that good. I went and did a Youtube tour of Swift's hits and can find nothing remarkable about the music at all. It sounds like all of contemporary country, which is to say it is a music drained of anything compelling. There is no danger, no sex, no violence. There is no emotion more complicated than teen-aged longing.2 But let's just assume that Swift is the best of this sexless lot.

But that doesn't change the wonder of Swift's domination of all of popular music. Why Taylor Swift? Why has a country artist been lauded with Album of the Year and Best Video awards, muscling aside big hip hop, rock and R&B acts like Beyonce, Green Day, Lil Wayne and/or Jay Z?

Perhaps it's sales. If music awards truly were a popularity contest, then Swift deserved all her awards. Her Fearless was the top selling album of all of 2009. It is currently number 13 on the Billboard charts after 64 weeks. Cultural elites love to sniff at sales as obviously void of serious significance.3 But hey, a lot of people clearly like Swift. And a lot of people like Swift more than anyone else. That's gotta count for something, right?

Well I think it's a clue. The fact that Swift's album is the best selling record of 2009 means that she is liked by a very wide margin. She's sold more than 5 million albums in an era when people no longer buy albums. This is significant.

But What makes Swift so popuar?

First: Swift is irrefutably attractive. She's an ideal country crooner for 2010: tall, willowy, blond and beautiful. She favors dresses if not gowns. She's glamorous, never casual.

Second, and this might be counter intuitive in a nation that seems to be in a constant state of moral decline: Swift is very wholesome. She is not Pamela Anderson. In several videos I saw, Swift appears as a student -- an everygirl with an armload of books who has finally put the guitar down to go to class and pine for a young man, often portrayed by the kind of guy best described as an Abercrombie and Fitch model (who are not wearing cowboy hats). She has been linked to know controversy or slip of character that I can find.

Like a presidential candidate, Swift has become wildly successful by sticking to the middle of the road better than anyone else. She is inoffensive, modestly talented (or just talented enough) to sing her way to super stardom. Swift is an ideal of the middle road, an empty slate on which young and old can assign her a meaning: dream friend, dream daughter, dream girlfriend, etc. and so forth. It is easy to be infatuated with someone who has good looks and fails to offend.

What it means beyond Swift's super fame, is that country music has ascended to a remarkable position in popular American culture. This is not outlaw music anymore. Swift's mediocrity is not remarkable for the genre -- a genre in which all of the innovations have been cosmetic. Country music stars are all attractive and few traffic in the old gimmicks once expected of them (when was the last time a cowboy outfits really struck anyone as authentic?4). Swift's fame might have happened to any number of young, attractive and unoffensive songsters. What country has done is remade the classic "aw shucks" modesty into an affect that is both sexy and safe at the same time, at least when it isn't busy with boorish jingoism.

Could the trend continue? Have Americans really decided to part ways with the much more sexed and far less safe best-selling acts like Eminem, L'il Wayne and 50 Cent (see footnote 3) in favor of an idealized star, a pretty young blond from Pennsylvania preoccupied with teenage romanticism? The cynic in me believes that perhaps what country music is really offering is an alternative to white America that is free of nearly any trace of the urban, the immigrant and the brown. It's an alternative that is being gobbled up, too.5

But perhaps you don't have to be white to want your music sheltered from the underside of American culture that is so often pervasive in a lot of other forms of music, film and TV. Either way, Swift's popularity is remarkable. It marks something completely new, even if we don't understand all of it just yet.

Footnotes:
1. This is an un-researched conclusion, but its based on real numbers. Since 2006, Swift has been nominated for 86 awards and received 59 of them. In the last year she's swept the CMAs, BMIs and Billboard awards. She's won MTV awards and Grammys. She's even won an award in Thailand for international artist. By comparison, U2, the band that has won 22 Grammys -- more than any other music act ever -- has won 67 awards in 30 years of recording.

2. Is there a musical genre that has fallen farther than country? Country used to be all danger and violence. It told the story of primordial America in all its gritty horror. Don't believe me? Listen to the blind guitarist Doc Watson's Ballads from Deep Gap a collection of traditional country and blues songs full of murdered lovers, train crashes and shootouts. That, my friends, is country music.

3. This is quite true. The list of year-by-year est selling albums is a wasteland of mediocrity. In the '00s these are the best selling acts, beginning in 2000: N'Sync, Linkin Park, Eminem, 50 Cent, Usher, Maria Carey, High School Musical: the Soundtrack (!), Josh Grobin (!!!), Lil Wayne and Swift.

4. Which forces one to ponder: What the hell is wrong with Bob Dylan these days, anyway?

5. This is from Wikipedia on Country Music: While album sales of most musical genres have declined, country music experienced one of its best years in 2006, when, during the first six months, U.S. sales of country albums increased by 17.7 percent to 36 million. Moreover, country music listening nationwide has remained steady for almost a decade, reaching 77.3 million adults every week, according to the radio-ratings agency Arbitron, Inc.^[4][5]"

Hiller is no 'Fool' to take on Beatle

Last summer, as nearly everyone was lining up to buy the remastered reissues of the Beatles back catalogue, local piano fixture, Reverend Chris Marsceill was conceiving a one-time performance of Beatles classics at Tavern on the Hill that he would release as a live album.

Marsceill, who may be the busiest musician in Chestnut Hill — he plays solo and in several different combos — is a Chestnut Hill area native and Springfield Township High School grad who moved back after his New Orleans home was obliterated in Hurricane Katrina. The 29-year-old has been playing piano since he was six.

But, Reverend Chris (his stage name; he is not an ordained minister) has stuck primarily with jazz. He studied jazz performance at Loyola University in New Orleans, so the Beatles were not necessarily an obvious fit for him.

“It was interesting to me as a guy with a jazz background,” Marsceill said in a recent interview. “I don’t play many Beatles songs. Some of them I’d never even heard, like 'Rain,' for example.”

To produce the live album, Chris thought of doing a show in conjunction with the release. He had a plan to perform three sets of songs with an upright bass player and a percussionist and to have local recording engineer Jason Fifield, who often plays bass with Chris, record the performance.

Once he had the show booked, Marsceill prepared for it quickly. “I worked out the arrangements on my own,” he said. “The bassist and I got together four times. The percussionist? We never got together. We had to laugh. He said , ‘I feel more comfortable going in not knowing anything.’”

The document of that Sept. 12 performance, “Fool on the Hill, “ is now available, both at Chestnut Hill’s Hideaway Music and on iTunes. The album cover is a really nice-looking classic Blue Note-style cover featuring a green-tinted black and white photo of Marsceill at the keyboard. It’s a 15-song collection of Beatles’ classics, from “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Lady Madonna” to “Come Together” and “Here Comes the Sun.”

Each song is a live performance. Marsceill recruited upright bass player Tony Garro and percussionist Gregory Morgan — credited with playing djembe, dumbeck, bongos, shakers, cowbells, washboard, cymbals and tambourine. Local songstress Katie Drake cameos on “Come Together” with a strong vocal performance.

Throughout the performance, Marsceill’s energy is high. The playing on the CD by all is really quite good, particularly for a live album. Marsceill’s arrangements are lively and inventive. His vocals are at first a bit shaky, but they really warm up by the third song, “Lady Madonna.”

“[The show] was fun,” he said. “It was different; you know the place was packed with people.”

That crowd can be heard a little. Fifield’s recording is clean with minimal background bleed into the microphones he used — particularly when they cheer as Marsceill ramps up a favorite like “Something” or “Come Together.” A little more room ambience might have been nice to hear, but the high energy of the musicians involved permeates the album. For a fun local document and some nice recordings of Beatles standards, “Fool on the Hill” is well worth a spin.

“Fool on the Hill” can be physically purchased at Hideaway Music, 8612 Germantown Ave.

From Cape Town to Cape Cod

Pop tastes are funny. One thing that a lot of music critics don't like to acknowledge is that 95 percent of the music-listening public cares very little about the art of music making.1 They want to listen to stuff that's catchy, danceable and performed by an artist or band that would look really good on the cover of a magazine. That music could be Nirvana or it Could be Beyonce. It's all catchy. It's all pop, isn't it?

Exhibit A is the much-heralded Vampire Weekend, which released it's sophomore record Contra this week. A spirited mix of early Police, Paul Simon's Graceland, King Sunny Ade and F. Scott Fitzgerald, this band of Upper West Side prep school kids and Columbia U. grads has become one of the most unlikely band of underground heroes since that other big group of NYC upper-crusters: The Strokes.

But unlike The Strokes who were traveling a pretty easy-to-read path to big record sales, Vampire Weekend is unlike anything being praised in indie circles today. In fact it's not like any music being recorded on this continent right now. Vampire Weekend -- Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Chris Tomson and Chris Baio -- draws a little from electro-pop and ska and a great deal from afro-pop, including snaking guitar lines that recall Ali Farka Toure. Koenig sounds an awful lot like Paul Simon here and at times like Sting in 1977. It's definitely played through an American filter, but it could easily pass as world music to the casual listener.

That this music is being played by upper-class white kids -- songs on the band's debut ranged in subject matter from avoiding a college fling at Columbia to the physical and psychological difficulties of getting off of Cape Cod -- is hard to reconcile, but it doesn't seem to bother this band's growing fan base. Despite all the obvious things to hate -- the wealth, the polo shirts, the biggest white appropriation of world music since "Roxanne," Vampire Weekend is a fun band to listen to.2 The second single on Contra, "Cousins" played a week ago on David Letterman, is a frenetic, infectious explosion of a pop song. It may be the best single I've heard in at least a year.

On first listening to Contra, I felt a little let down to not hear more of that same energy. This is not to say the rest of the album is bad, but it is not as great as that single. For most of the record, the band sticks to a much more mid-tempo bounce with tunes that rely a lot more on synthesizer sounds. A first impression is that a lot of these songs might not sound out of place on a Postal Service album.

A few other standouts for me are the driving (almost a rocker) "Giving up the Gun" and the ska romp "Holiday." A lot of the others songs are on the slow side but they are tuneful and well conceived. Overall, the album has a unity of sound and style that make for a great album. While I am still feeling a bit let down that nothing grabs me quite like "Cousins," I think it's a record that will grow on me with more time.

We could debate the appropriateness of a band of rich white kids playing African music for a long time, but it won't change the fact that Vampire Weekend is a pretty good band that now has another really enjoyable performance under its belt in Contra. I've never been comfortable to find myself on a bandwagon, but this is good music and well worth listening to.

Footnotes

1. Sound Opinions host and Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis blasted the band for its affluent origins and similarly themed song lyrics, stating at one point that the band "had nothing to say." I found it a really curious complaint. Most lyricists, particularly since 1990, write exclusively about themselves. Maybe most people can't relate to the sudden need to escape Cape Cod, but a lot of great bands have sung about little more than sex, drugs and partying in Manhattan (The Strokes)... so I don't get the point. If you're looking for good social commentary, you're not going to find it (in great supply) in music. In fact, I think its safe to say that most bands have had nothing to say since about 1968.

2. The band members called their music "Upper West Side Soweto," which could be seen as cute or stupid depending on who you talk to. Soweto is not strictly a a type of music, as far as I can tell, but is a place where great African music is made. Soweto is historically black section of Johannesburg in South Africa that was repeatedly cracked down upon by that country's old Apartheid government. It was the site of the 1976 Soweto Uprising in which 23 people were killed when black students revolted against an edict by the government to teach in Afrikaans instead of English. My guess is that the irony of that area's history was lost on the youthful members of the band. To them it's just where Paul Simon got his band. ... Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Whither Modern Rock? Pt. II Soundgarden Rides Again

With all the reunions of big '90s bands anounced in the last year -- Blur, Pavement, Rage Against The Machine, Stone Temple Pilots, Faith no More (!) -- it was inevitable that those louder-than-rock Seattleites, Soundgarden, would join in. Sure, it probably means they were just running out of cash, but I'm still looking forward to the reunion.

I must confess, I really like Soundgarden. My two favorite albums not by Nirvana from the whole Seattle scene of the early '90s are Mudhoney's Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and SG's Badmotorfinger. The former is a fuzzy, pop masterpiece that really rewards a return listen (I hadn't listened to it in years -- had it on cassette!). Badmotorfinger is a nearly flawless collection of Sabbath-influenced hard rock. A testament to its greatness -- and that of the band in general -- is that many couldn't figure out whether the band was hard rock, grunge or heavy metal. They were as loud and dark as any metal bands, but they were melodic, smart (no songs about wizards, hobbits or Satan).

When Soundgarden broke up it never made sense. Their next two albums after Badmotorfinger-- Superunknown and Down on the Upside -- were highly regarded by critics. Superunkown earned the band two grammys (ironically, the song "Spoonman," perhaps their worst song, won "best metal performance" and the song "Black Hole Sun" won best hard rock performance). There was little news about the split that made sense. Seemed singer Chris Cornell wanted to do more ballads, while guitarist Kim Thayil favored faster and harder material. Cornell would later say that the band was "eaten up by the business."

In the last decade, drummer Matt Sheppard joined Pearl Jam (with whom he's made some great music) while Cornell fronted the really abysmal Audioslave and put out a few solo albums, including one recorded with hip hop producer Timbaland, which might be the worst recording released in the last 10 years. Heavy rock, in the meantime, suffered substantially without a band that could play it well the right way -- super loud, rhythmically complicated, dark and moody but with lyrics that matter to people who are older than 16. Queens of the Stone Age has been the only band to keep heavy rock interesting, since.

It's exciting to have such a good and innovative band back. Will they be able to duplicate their heady '90s work? Who knows. Probably not. But when they go on tour, I won't miss the chance to see them.