ENCI Records
Christopher Nosnibor
It’s taken me a while to get around to this one. It happens, and happens often: I’m simply overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of new – and exciting – releases that land with me on a daily basis. Of all the things to be overwhelmed by (and I will confess that I often find myself overwhelmed by many other things, too, from parenting challenges to DIY, budgeting and the prospect of driving to the supermarket), I do realise that I’m extremely fortunate. But there’s a specific reason I’ve selected this album to post a review of today. Why today? For those who live in a vacuum – and at this moment, I truly envy you – today is the day Oasis announced their reunion and a fourteen-date UK tour. ‘The news the world has been waiting for’, people frothed on FaceBook. Fuck me: judging by the reaction and the blanket press coverage, you’d think world peace and a handout of million quid for every person on the planet had just been announced simultaneously. But no. Just a couple of gobshites have decided that for a few hundred million quid they can bare to be in one another’s presence for a bit. It’s not even looking like it’s the full or original band reuniting.
For many, Oasis were, and remain, the best band on the planet in the whole of history. For anyone with ears, they were purveyors of lumpen, lifeless, plodding, derivative pub rock. A great many of the people who are going absolutely fucking apeshit at the news are broadly in my demographic, who were in their twenties in the nineties, and who, on hitting thirty, found their cultural clock stalled, and they’ve spent the last twenty years or so bemoaning the fact that there’s no been any decent new music since the 90s and how they miss Chris Evans and TFI Friday.
Just as age tends to have a correspondence with increasing political conservatism, so the same is true of musical tastes. It’s why parents of every generation gripe about the music their kids listen to and dismiss it as being shite, without appreciating that they’re not supposed to like or even understand it, because they’re not the target audience. Do I get K-Pop? No, no more than Skibidi Toilet makes any sense or provides any amusement to me. It would be weird if I was down with the kids at the age of 48, and my daughter would likely find me even more embarrassing if I was than being the dinosaur she perceives me as. BUT – and it’s a massive but, a but so massive Sir Mix-A-Lot would die for, that doesn’t mean that there’s no new music of interest any more.
Certified, the debut album by San Diego-based Los Saints, is a perfect illustration of this fact. They describe themselves as an alternative rock band. Various other sources, in their coverage, have referred to them as showcasing a ‘bold indie rock sound’, ‘indie’, and even ‘Chula Vista’s version of Cage the Elephant’, alongside numerous comparisons to The Strokes. I’m not a fan of either The Strokes or Cage the Elephant, but that’s beside the point: both of these acts have produced music far more exciting than anything Oasis mustered during their career spent serving up half-baked bollocks and right now, in the present, amidst the endless wanking over the announcement that after fifteen years a couple of overrated has-beens are going to reheat their tedious, tepid stodge in the name of nostalgia and the interest of payola, we have Los Saints giving us Certified.
There are rib-rattling basslines aplenty, which give the songs – which tend to be on the shorter side, with only a couple of the album’s ten tracks running over three and a half minutes – a really beefy sound and a certain dynamism, an urgency (the likes of which you’ll hardly ever find in an Oasis song). Lead single ‘Faded’, which kick-starts the album with a lively two-minute stomp not only gets things off to a cracking start, but sets the tone, too – dreamy, slightly fuzzy, psychedelic vocals and mellow guitars contrast with the stonking rhythm section, and if anything, ‘Where We Goin’, which follows it is even better, and then again, the punky, poppy, melodic guitar driven indie of ‘Hard’, which lands perfectly between Asylums and Pixies. Even if the rest of the album was shit, after this opening run, you wouldn’t grumble. But no, they keep on delivering joyous tunes with the grungy pop nouse of DZ Deathrays crossed with the driving tones of Darklands era Jesus and Mary Chain and a dash of A Place to Bury Strangers. The title track pairs a nagging guitar with another chunky-as-anything bass before blasting into a breezy but sturdy chorus, and there simply isn’t a dud here.
The production isn’t overly polished, giving the album a live-sounding energy, and this only enhances its appeal, because you feel the band are really in the music, feeling the playing of the songs. Yes, some of the touchstones may be from some mythical golden era – as identified by people of a certain age – but Los Saints show that they can write songs – rather than rip them off – and deliver them with a contagious vibrance.
Bollocks to nostalgia: Certified is proof that not only is there some great new music around, but that a lot of stuff that’s held up as being ‘classic’ is objectively underwhelming and its status is tied to a period in time – and popularity is no measure of anything other than popularity itself – or, more probably, good marketing.
AA
Aural Aggravation 