Posts Tagged ‘Weezer’

Arcade Fortress – Younique

Posted: 21 October 2022 in Albums
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26th September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Ever spend time scratching your head wondering what a song or band remind you of, and drawing eternal blanks? Yeah, I get it a lot: I put it down to exposure. Too much music to process.

This is by no means my first introduction to Arcade Fortress: we’ve featured three of their previous singles here on these pages, and I personally described ‘Sabotage’ as ‘a fully-realised anthemic beast of a tune’. And I stand by that, too.

Younique the album finds them powering into the title track by way of an opener, there are samples seeping from the corners as they thrust away at a punk / rock / pop hybrid sound with incendiary energy.

Younique may not be unique by any stretch, but then nor is it derivative, and my ponderance for comparisons is a frustrating distraction but simply a habit of mine. I can’t help but try to place references, lifts, nods. It’s perhaps because there’s so much going on and Younique is such a melting pot of all things from 90s grunge to post-millennial punk-pop that placing any of it specifically is nigh on impossible, and as a result, what you’re faced with is the vibe, and it’s deep retro.

They encourage us, the listener, to sit back, relax and enjoy a rollercoaster of a ride over 12 anthemic rock tracks, but it’s not as easy as all that. The slow-burning Sabotage’ sits four tracks in and there’s no questioning its anthemic enormity, and I can’t help but think of a grungier take on the sound of Depeche Mode circa Ultra, perhaps, when they were grittier and more guitar-driven.

But there’s a lot happening here. It’s not all absolutely killer: ‘Alan Bell’ gets a bit emo and lightweight, and elsewhere, and ‘Killing Time’ sits between Weezer and 80s hair rock, while ‘Tangible’ throws an area-friendly curveball. In contrast, the driving ‘Uppercut’ is more reminiscent of Therapy? circa Troublegum and its tense, taut, and totally kicks arse, as does the riff-driven ‘Strontium Dog’. ‘Dark Seeds’ is more of a punky / hard rock crossover.

It’s not always easy to make a casting vote, and it’s not always fair to get off the fence when it comes to weighing up maters of opinion and taste. Ultimately, Younique finds Arcade Fortress packing some solid tunes, and that’s hard to argue, regardless of taste.

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Listen: ‘Joy Thief’ by Dosser

Posted: 5 September 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Agh. We shouldn’t dig this… but we do. It’s kinda grunge light, a bit Weezer (ugh),and early Foos (meh) but then it’s also a bit Bivouac, and so on, and it’s hard to hate it in a nostalgic kind of way…

Over the past decade, it’s become increasingly in vogue for bands to pay lip service to 90s alt rock, but many of them capture only the most surface level cosmetic elements, missing the critical components that defined that decade’s underground scene. A chorus pedal, a Big Muff, and a flannel don’t go far on their own merits. To put it bluntly, many groups fundamentally do not “get it”. But Baltimore, MD’s Dosser absolutely does.

Where many of their contemporaries are little more than thinly-veiled pop punk acts doing retro cosplay, Dosser gets at the core of what made 90s guitar rock such a compelling force. From leads that hearken back to early Weezer, massive riffs that evoke Jawbox, and razor-sharp pop-rock sensibilities that bring to mind the Foo Fighters’ debut LP, this is a band synthesizing the best parts of various forms into their own potent formula.

Formed in the summer of 2018 by Will Teague, Bret Lanahan, Eric Dudley, and Max Detrich, Dosser’s debut LP finds a band playing at a level well beyond what their short lifespan might suggest. Coming out on Really Rad Records in January 2023, Violent Picture / Violent Sound is about as strong an opening volley as it gets.

Of the track, Dosser’s Bret Lanahan (guitar, vocals) says: "Since I was a kid I’ve struggled greatly with crippling anxiety and depression. I didn’t understand when I was younger what either of those things were and always thought something was wrong with me or I had something bad inside me making me feel this way. I used to have this kind of weird day dream a lot that if I could just open up my chest and let whatever was inside of me that was making me feel so terrible just spill out, maybe I would feel better.

It wasn’t a bloody scene or anything like that, I guess it was just the only way my younger brain could picture getting rid of bad thoughts. As I got older and had a better understanding of what mental illness looked like I was able to get help in the form of medication. The song goes back and forth with the feeling of being trapped in one of two corners that I think are pretty common in people trying to deal with or treat mental illness. Either you treat it with medication and get to a point where you feel almost nothing at all and totally empty, or just deal with it and have such intense feelings that you can hardly bare it. Finding a release is the hardest thing to do. The lyrics are fairly simple but they hold a great weight for me."

Listen to ’Joy Thief’ here:

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Photo: Zack Pohuski

Sweethearts – If I Could I Would

Posted: 29 June 2021 in Singles and EPs
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25th June 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

The older you get, the weirder things get. On the one hand, the generational gap widens by the day, but on the other, you see thing come full circle, and faster. Growing up in the 80s, the fact of the matter is that my parents had abysmal taste in music, both contemporary and of their era. My mum would groove to Phil Collins and Tina Turner and Paul Young Van Halen and the fucking Bee Gees while ironing, while my dad hadn’t bought a new LP since Steeleye Span’s ‘All Around My Hat’. Car journeys on family holidays were a real hoot, what with Leo Sayer and 80s Cliff Richard tapes alternating with Now That’s What I Call Music 1 and 2. Philip Larking was right: your parents fuck you up in ways they don’t even realise. However, the point is that increasingly, new bands are turning to their parents’ rather cooler collections and discovering the likes of Nirvana, Pavement, Weezer, Teenage Fanclub and Pixies – and Sweethearts are a case in point.

They’re pitched as standing at the forefront of the 90s resurgence, but for some of us, the 90s never ended, especially for many of those who were in their teens and early twenties at the time and are around 4 now. Midlife crisis? Maybe. But then, for many, music stops when they hit 30, and I’ve spent the last fifteen years listening to peers bemoaning the lack of any decent new music. They’re all wrong, of course: there has been innovative and exciting new music released every year since the beginning of music. It just happens that none of the music of interest has received any kind of mainstream attention for a long time. But it’s all out there if you know where to look.

You wouldn’t call ‘If I Could I Would’ innovative, but that isn’t the point: this is a classic example of a band drawing on their influences, which so happen to reach back a generation – and distilling them into a strong and potent mix. ‘If I Could I Would’ is a melodic grunge-leaning slice of college rock, but there are some obvious indie features spun into the composition, not least of all the lead guitar part that spins its way around the rhythm section like a tripwire.

Lyrically, the song explores the limitations of desire and capability, and the song’s hook is a neat piece of circular, self-negating logic: ‘If I could, I would, but I can’t so I couldn’t’. It’s not nihilistic, just more a slackerist ‘meh’, and with its nostalgia-inducing retro musical backing, it’s the perfect summary of the listlessness of the zeitgeist.

Sweethearts - Artwork