Has anyone ever really fully defined the term, ‘slacker rock’? For me it involves a loose, laid-back approach to alternative music mixed with what used to be called a ‘college rock’ sound. The proponents of this sound were bands like Pavement, Modest Mouse, Grandaddy, Built to Spill, Swearing at Motorists and Guided by Voices, who emerged in the early 1990′s. These bands took genres like shoegaze, garage rock and psychedelia, mixed them all together and spat out their findings. Sonically this loose collection of bands tended to be born out of a lo-fi approach to music (who needs expensive instruments and slick production sounds?) but ended up being more about a wonky approach to classic rock, mixed with lashings of tongue in cheek humour and surrealism – the classic albums of that genre and era being Pavement’s ‘Slanted & Enchanted’, ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’ and ‘Wowee Zowee’, Modest Mouse’s ‘The Lonesome Crowded West’ and Grandaddy’s ‘Under the Western Freeway’. If Pub-Rock was meat and two veg, Slacker-Rock was bacon and egg ice cream.
So, what’s Post-Slacker-Rock and who are it’s main proponents? Well, for me, Post-Slacker-Rock is a new extension of the old Slacker-Rock approach and aesthetic. If anything it blends in an even greater number of genre’s and styles than Slacker Rock and benefits from a new age of cheaper, better quality production equipment and from the diversity of music now available to the modern listener (due to the rise of the download).
I think Foilface are Post-Slacker-Rock – direct but surreal, poetic but immediate and sonically varied. Other bands that fall under the very loose bracket of Post-Slacker-Rock include Cymbals Eat Guitars, who hail from Staten Island, New York and offer a proggish take on slacker-rock, with brooding soundscapes, odd dreamlike lyrics and the classic quiet to loud take on alternatve music that builds and builds before taking off. Suckers (also from New York but this time, Brooklyn) belt out a late-Pavement meets I’m From Barcelona kind of sound, mixing lots of expansive sonics, including horns, lazy choral vocals and shout-a-long choruses as well as drone-ish and shoegazey moments.
It’s not all New York based though. There are also a couple of Australian bands who fall under PSR genre moniker. Quarter Acre and Sounds Like Sunset both hail from Sydney and where Quarter Acre opt for a better produced take on early Pavement, Sounds Like Sunset pull in influences like the Jesus & Mary Chain and Ride to summon up a shoegazey take on proceedings.
There’s also Hockey, a Canadian band whose, ‘Too Fake’ single got a fair bit of airplay on both sides of the Atlantic. Where the other groups have a very authentic and at times soup-thick take on the genre, Hockey head at things from a slightly glam-rock inspired angle and have a bit of a stadium sheen to their sound. Not quite as experiental but very accessible nonetheless.
Recent music seems to be cleaning up it’s act and climbing high as the world economy flounders. Maybe hard times yield great music or maybe it’s just a coincidence. Either way post-slacker rock rules. Try some.
