Roller dozy: Ellen Page lied to me

As soon as we drove into the car park we were buoyed by the sight the giant shed with large blue ‘70s font curling across it, reading “Skate Centre”. It had been a decision made on the third day of a somewhat cheeky work-wag week to catch up with old friends out of town, even though I don’t actually think anyone needs an excuse to ditch life for a while and escape into the long grass. We’d been lying around, admittedly slightly hung over, talking about the film Whip It! and trading childhood skating stories (yes, back then we all got around on wheels instead of crack), and before we knew it we were in a bitumen lot that struck a remarkable resemblance to the one in which Ellen Page gets her first hit of roller derby adrenalin. This one, however, was near empty and we were far too craggy and dumbed by the previous night’s beer intake to make any charmingly sarcastic repartee or be mistaken for spirited 17-year-olds.

The group of girls who walked into the centre ahead of us weren’t, however. There were five of them, all wearing long, red-and-black-striped socks with pig-tails and tank tops emblazoned with “Speed Demonic” and “Skate Skank”, kicking each other in the heels and generally ‘talking trash’. We were, we thought, in the presence of real-life out-of-town derby chicks and, inspired by the role-play, hired roller skates rather than the blades we’d been brought up on. (That said, the last time I wore blades involved speeding down my steep childhood street towards a busy intersection and having to purposely fall over onto a gravel driveway before reaching the bottom, tearing strips out of my arms and legs in the process and not really winning any points in the ‘90s battle for skate cred.)

Inside, too, the rink was just like the nostalgia-smacked film, barely touched since the ‘70s, right down to the $2 skate hire and cardboard buckets of hot chips being served over the canteen counter. There was even an old fat dude perched high up in a booth, commentating on those making loops around the cement floor in the centre of the room, with well-worn catchphrases like, “That was a doozy!” and, “She’s done this before!” suavely bellowed just like the guy from The Price Is Right. In fact, it might have been the guy from The Price Is Right.

The music was another matter. A chart-thieving mix of new American rap (not the good kind) and bland ‘atmospheric’ dance pop, it wasn’t exactly the glam rock or riot grrrl fantasy we’d dreamed up back on the couch. Bikini Kill had been replaced with Iyaz, and Kiss with Stan Walker.

The scene once we entered the rink was even more depressing. The derby girls, it turned out, weren’t derby girls at all but hopeless losers like us who could barely put one wheel-bottomed foot in front of the other. Together – us and them – we were the unskilled tourists amongst a crowd of families and well-underage kids who were skating, mostly on blades, like they came to the rink every weekend, gliding gracefully around in practical, loose-fitted clothing and smiling and waving as they passed each other. There wasn’t a side-swipe, beer, ripped jean or cuss word for miles. It was like they hadn’t even heard of Whip It!.

We joined the parading sober people and, after some time, the music turned towards more Aus-centric radio-rock fare; to a coastal anthem by The Sundance Kids, the wistfully grungy new single from British India, a bit of Gyroscope and even – I think, though I might have been deluded by all the bright surf-brand t-shirts – a song by winsome Brisbane duo Ellington. It wasn’t the riot we were hoping for, but rolling along in a wholesome daze, the tracklist seemed oddly fitting; catchy, sincere and somewhat heartening local band-rock soundtracking an innocence that was, here, obviously enacted weekend after weekend in this weird time-machine of a place.

It was a different kind of role-play I almost wished I could take part in more often. That is, until the lights went down, the disco balls up and Owl City’s Fireflies came on.

Is Gerard Way getting into Palin's pants?

It was going to be a preview of the future of ‘mainstream’ rock for those with any desire to witness such a thing. Between the pop punk reformists and revivalists, the nuance-heavy metallers, and steez-clinging oldies like Faith No More and Placebo, the Soundwave festival tour, which begins its national run this weekend, was going to give us a glimpse of what we can expect to see from arena rockers and would-be arena rockers in the coming years. But the one band name that was going to make that happen is now missing from the set times: My Chemical Romance.

The New Jersey band recently announced that their fourth album, due sometime this year, is to turn on the thinking that made them bare their conceptual dreams like a brown-eye and arrange them like drunken musical nudie runs, thus turning on the proverbial light for other bands to prove how giant their own rock-swords were. The Used proved they had a pretty sizeable one; 30 Seconds To Mars probably shouldn’t have revealed theirs. Arena rock’s latest saviours (whether we needed one or not is questionable, though I’ve always had a ‘soft spot’ for MCR) have gone as far as they can, MCR’s Gerard Way has been espousing to the press; Muse having the final word on pompous-arse-being with The Resistance means the only way for their peers to go is in the opposite direction: towards rougher, straighter garage rock sounds.

In a cover story in the NME a couple of weeks back, Way told that the band’s yet untitled fourth record would be a “punk” album. “I think it plugs into the fact that maybe people right now just simply want to have a good time, you know? Maybe they just want to feel free. Maybe they don’t want to rebel,” he said.

And so “punk” would be the gateway to that un-thinking, with new songs like Death Before Disco (viewable in pieces as live clips on YouTube) following the punk’d-up cover of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row they recorded for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film adaptation in ‘09. Death Before Disco’s lyrics sum up the ideology: “This ain’t a party!/Get off the dancefloor!/You wanna get down!/I want a gang war!”

While we won’t get to see this new direction onstage this month, and thus won’t get to have an honest debate about how many world-known bands have moved from pop rock towards punk rather than the other way around (can you think of any?), all this talk of leaving once rebellious emotional empathy/sympathy in the past is echoing another happening: that of the “Tea Party” movement, led by the biggest un-thinker of them all, Sarah Palin. (When typing that, I accidentally just wrote ‘of the mall’ instead of ‘of them all’ – and come to think of it, Palin probably wouldn’t be able to see the sail boat, either.)

Palin, working up to her position as a Fox News political analyst (gonna get some balanced analysis there), has been on the media trail riling up conservatives for the upcoming midterm elections for congress and, further ahead, the 2012 presidential campaign. By and large, Palin’s rhetoric has centred on deriding Barack Obama for being educated and emotional, and championed brash action led by ‘the people’, just as the original ‘Boston Tea Party’ did in 1773, when they boarded three ships and dumped the cargo of British-taxed tea that Boston officials had refused to send back to Britain in protest of paying a tax not decided by their own elected representatives.

The “Tea Party” is an anti-party movement with, seemingly, few plans other than to overthrow a government that hasn’t solved their financial problems or appeased their desire for xenophobic attacks. “We need a Commander-In-Chief, not a professor of law,” Palin told a Tea Party convention earlier this month. What she could have said instead was, “Get off the dancefloor! I want a gang war!”

So, where political conservatism is being cloaked in mutiny, could the mutinous, anti-pomp sounds of the newest incarnation of ‘punk’ be the musical equivalent; the soundtrack to rebellion rebellion? Or is it really just sword-swiping dudes zipping their flies back up? Either way, arena rock (and any last attempts at ‘emo’ labelling, though that’s another matter) is again coming to an end and we’ll all just have to get used to looking at Gerard Way with his, and our, pants on.

Is Stephin Merritt a good folk?

Oh, there it is: that bulbous pretension delivered with naïve sincerity. That deep, sexy voice and cynical, sadistic sense of humour; the lonely laments and elated realisations. The smack-me-then-hug-me-ness of it all. It must be a new Magnetic Fields album. Stephin Merritt and his band delivered the third of their trio of ‘concept’ albums on, perhaps fittingly considering all those descriptors, Invasion/Survival/Australia Day; an album titled Realism (Nonesuch) to counter 2008’s Distortion album of washy electric guitars.

What’s interesting about that title is that the record is also what Merritt has described as his “folk album”, utilising primarily acoustic instruments drawn from various cultural traditions (accordion, sitar, banjo, flugelhorn) and minor percussion (well, minor compared to a drum kit, such as the cajon). Apparently, Merritt was originally to name the these last two albums, intended as a pair following his conceptually “soft rock” record i, ‘True’ and ‘False’, but couldn’t decide which label fitted which album. The titles Distortion and Realism were decided on instead, and “it is what it is”, Merritt recently said in an interview with Canada’s Dose.ca website.

But what is it? If Merritt’s ‘Realism’ is relating to the philosophical theory of Direct Realism – the idea that the world is as we see it, as opposed to all that subjective perception or mind-dependent perception crap (just kidding) – we’re to understand that ‘folk music’ is the stuff of what-we-hear-is-what-is-really-happening. In essence, it is still the ‘truth’. Merritt, however, is the antithesis of almost everything a ‘folk’ musician is known to be – a self-absorbed but ultimately innocent cynic who, even on Realism, hardly ascribes to any kind of ‘traditional’ method of songwriting. Yet, in many ways, he’s built a following for being what ‘folk musicians’ are also known to be: a ‘truth-teller’; a modern-day narrator of modern-day struggles. So is his version of ‘folk music’ the ‘truth’?

Fionn Regan, on the other hand, is the archetype of ‘folk musician’. His 2006 debut album of fingerpicked acoustic songs was connected in no broken line to the kind of unionist, mid-20th century folk songs of Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie – The End Of History. On that record, his songs were so intrinsically linked to the connectivity of humanity and to the laws of the land you almost expected him to drop the word “folk” into his stage banter when addressing the audience.

Regan’s second album, Shadow Of An Empire (Heavenly/Speak N Spell) is out at the start of March and takes up where ‘folk music’ became ‘folk rock’, a plugged-in, lyrically political album of nuanced foot-stompers (and a truly, truly, pants-droppingly remarkable one, it should be said) with song titles such as Protection Racket and Genocide Matinee. He wrote it while touring, “seeing the world, the bone structure, the pulp”. Though his voice is a new one in many regards, Regan is, in 2010, a ‘traditionalist’; a modern-day narrator of, perhaps, an old idea of what it means to be ‘the people’.

Then there’s Adam Green, whose Minor Love (Rough Trade/Remote Control) album was released at the beginning of January and who initially gained notoriety as the face of early-2000s ‘anti-folk’ in The Moldy Peaches. In that group, Green turned ‘traditional’, sincere, acoustic ‘folk song’ forms on their heads with ludicrous, arrogant and irreverent lyrics – the distorted version of Merritt’s ‘truth’. Green has gone on to do much the same with his solo career, largely swapping ‘folk’ for ‘cabaret’, but in 2007 he had one of the biggest ‘folk’-related hits of recent times with The Moldy Peaches’ Anyone Else But You from the Juno soundtrack – the clip reaching five million hits on YouTube alone – a song hardly ‘anti’ in its form or, for all the band’s genre-pegging, its lyrical content. It is, in the end, a song ‘of the people’, taken in by more people than any of Merritt’s or Regan’s songs.

So what is the ‘truth’ of ‘folk music’ in 2010? And is there even one? Maybe the answer to that depends on which side your philosophical bread is buttered, or whether you’re willing to admit to liking ‘folk music’ in the first place.

Down Sounds: January 2010

This year, I’m going to try something new with The Breakdown and dedicate one column a month to some of the more decent or interesting releases of the previous four weeks, or just stuff I’ve been led to online or stuff people are talking about elsewhere. That way I don’t have to try to cram them down the bottom of each week’s column and come up with some ludicrous tie-in to that particular week’s rant, like, for instance, working a plug for Melbourne’s excellent Absolute Boys into a column about lap swimming.

In the spirit of that, let’s start locally. Brisbane’s Kitchen’s Floor (pictured) last year released their debut album of thick, thorny no wave, Lonelieness Is A Dirty Mattress, and at the beginning of January stuck a cut-together live clip of a new track up on their MySpace, the song from which – Regrets – will be on a 7” coming out on RIP Society Records in February. It’s a minute-and-a-half surge of amp noise moved up and down by a melodic chant and interspersed with jarring guitar-string rubs.

Exo Records have released a seven-track 10” from Melbourne squealers Teen Archer, who excel in brash, primitive but maxed out garage punk. If you’re looking the band up online, there’s not a whole lot of info or sounds out there, but they’ve been kicking around since October 2008 and have played shows with Useless Children, Children Collide and all the bands who regressed into childhood (albeit a drunken one) at Flip Out.

Then there’s Crumbs, the solo project for Agents Of Abhorrence drummer and Brain Children (and Catcall) beat guy Max Kohane. Brain Children’s EP was one of the finest Australian dance releases of 2009, a lo-fi kosmische disco blend, and Crumbs steps even further into the hypnotic beats with glitch and snippy trip-hop effects. You can download it free from his Bandcamp.

LA and Brooklyn seem to have some kind of surf pop rock exchange program going on at the moment, and two bands who are getting some attention are LA’s Dum Dum Girls and Brooklyn’s Frankie & The Outs, both all-girl bands making gritty yet tropical, ‘60s-bent guitar pop. Dum Dum Girls have already signed to Sup Pop (and have a song titled Catholicked, so they gotta be good, right?), while Frankie Rose and her band are on Slumberland and have shows with Kurt Vile and The Primitives and spots at SXSW coming up.

This week sees Midlake’s new album of beardy folk that takes on more traditional forms (though not in a bad-sad ‘trad’ way), The Courage Of Others, out here through Speak N Spell, wrapping up a month that’s been largely about doped up, minimal folk pop on the bands-making-albums-that-are-getting-blog/column/people-inches front. Two teenaged Swedish girls who go by First Aid Kit released their debut album through Wichita Recordings in the UK to general gasping at their precociousness (but when will the media not gasp at young people doing absolutely anything?) and it is a pretty startlingly wonderful album – there’s got to be something special there that makes pretty basic recordings of two girls singing with guitars sound this heartbreaking and inspiring.

Basia Bulat’s oscillating warble does its thing over another album, out last week through Rough Trade/Shock, while Mistletone gave us Beach House’s new Teen Dream record, an album so sensitive and pleasurable it might well be an undiscovered erogenous zone. (And I realise sexualising an album titled Teen Dream is a bit wrong, but hey, I didn’t do this to society, I’m just going with it – gasp.) While we’re here, this Friday sees the release through Mistletone of an album by South Carolina 23-year-old Toro Y Moi, titled Causers Of This, a wash of bright psychedelic harmonies and keys with hip hop beats and enough bassline grooves to turn him into next summer’s most anticipated live experience.

But if you’re looking for something more on the gothic-glitch-dance side of things, check out We Are Like The Spider from Missouri, who I may or may not have found by looking at the Facebook groups of some New York hipster who was in a photo with Ssion and Jonny Makeup. Shut up, it was worth the shame.