18 minutes of nostalgia (sorry)

For separate reasons I've found myself listening to two of my favourite bands from the 90's that no one has ever heard of in the last week. So I thought I'd share them with you.

First up is Catherine. Coming out of Chicago the history of Catherine is entwined with The Smashing Pumpkins from the beginning. Both bands practiced out of the same studio in the early 90's and it was Catherine who introduced Billy Corgan to the Big Muff guitar pedal, which so greatly influenced the sound of Siamese Dream. When James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky started their own record label (Scratchie Records) Catherine was one of the first bands they signed. D'arcy was also married to drummer Kerry Brown for a while. (The two split up a while ago, but Kerry is still working with Corgan as an in house sound engineer for all the "new pumpkins" work.) Hot Saki & Bed Time Stories is a lot poppier than anything the Pumpkins ever released, but there's still a lot of melancholy and psychedelia throughout the album which explains the kinship between the two bands. Lead single Four Leaf Clover also features D'arcy on guest vocals.


Catherine - Four Leaf Clover

(While looking that video up, I also came across this video of the original (and still the best) Pumpkins attending band counseling, which shits all over Some Kind of Monster.)


Smashing Pumpkins Counselling

Second we're going to look at Janitor Joe, from Minneapolis. Limited Edition is just under 2 and a half minutes of post-hardcore, proto-grunge noise rock bliss. (They never made a video for it though so you can check out the clip for Boys In Blue here if you need to know what they looked like.)


Janitor Joe - Limited Edition

Bassist Kristen Pfaff left the band in 1993 to join Hole, and part of the lyrics to Limited Edition became the chorus for Miss World. Unfortunately Pfaff died of a heroin overdose in 1994 around two months after the release of Live Through This (and about two months after the death of Kurt Cobain who died 4 days before the album was released).

Once again the lovely people of Universal Music Group have disabled embedding for the Miss World video clip, but you can still go watch it on YouTube right here.

The Guitar Hero generation.

A couple of weeks ago one of my favourite websites brought the following video to my attention:
Attack Attack! - Stick Stickly


I'll leave it to Buddyhead to make fun of the awfulness of the song (and video). They do a great job, and I'd just be repeating them.

"Do you realize how many friends and family members could have pulled these clowns aside and been like 'Dudes, your band already sucks, let’s maybe not compound the problem by playing like you’re shitting a guitar out of your mangina'? Apparently no one felt like doing that."

But the other thing that struck me about this video/song is how much it made me think of the Guitar Hero episode of South Park. Look at these kids, they look exactly like the kids you'd see at arcades playing Dance Dance Revolution. Like the kids in South Park, their first musical influence came not from bands, but from video games. When asked if they like this music, Kyle replies "Yeah dude, it's Guitar Hero!"

The song itself combines elements of the fairly pedestrian emo-core, metal and rock music that is a staple of Guitar Hero. Like game music it also changes often, and dramatically. And some of the elements seem like they don't belong together - Auto-tuned vocals in the style of T-Pain combined with screaming? Many record labels see video games as a lucrative source of song publishing these days and many songs are released in this media first. In this context such a combination not only makes sense, it's inevitable.

The biggest evidence of the video game influence on Attack Attack!'s musical development comes with the song's biggest change at 2:46. All of a sudden we go from a hardcore breakdown to DDR style dance pop. Right on cue the whole band starts to run on the spot too. Take away their instruments and put a mat with coloured lights on the floor, and it kinda looks like this:
DDR Tournament


I'd say most of their dance moves have their origin in DDR.

Personally, I'm not a fan of Guitar Hero. I was attracted to the concept, but I've tried to play it, and I suck. I find it's nothing like playing a real guitar, and being able to do so seems to make it harder. I do especially bad on songs that I actually know how to play. In fact, I'm pretty much like Randy Marsh:
Randy tries to play Guitar Hero


But then I've never been a big gamer anyway. You could follow Sharon Marsh's argument that "if they spent half the time learning a real instrument as they do playing that game, who knows what they could accomplish". But the fact is the majority of people who play Guitar Hero are gamers, not musicians. They love playing the games, but have no interest in playing music. Sure there's going to be some crossover. Two other members of my band love the games (in the last 2 weeks they've made me play Guitar Hero Metallica at least 3 times, despite sucking at it and not being a Metallica fan). But then music is so universal that there's bound to be a percentage of any culture who will become musicians - even gamers. And that's where we get Attack Attack!

The problem with this song for me is not that it attempts to mash so many styles together. I'm a big fan of bands who take risks and allow themselves to be influenced by styles of music outside their own. It's just that in this case the whole thing seems so forced. The changes sound like they've taken snippets of many different songs and pasted them one after the other. Games may have influenced their musical tastes, but they haven't taught much in the way of songwriting. Other bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan jump around as much, if not more, than Attack Attack!, but their transitions are smoother. And no matter how weird or unexpected the change, there's always a sense of purpose to the song. Bands like Attack Attack! and brokeNCYDE seem to just be trying to shove all their favourite things into the one box, whether they fit or not. For now, this seems to be the influence of games on the music scene. For better or worse, the Guitar Hero generation have arrived.