AEM050 WALLcreeper

Rock n’ roll is a bit like my tur­tle, in the sense that every time I think it’s going to die, it man­ages some­how to plug along for another ten years. It’s a new decade every­one, and even if the oughts gave birth to more micro-revivals and quan­tum gen­res than any­one could care to keep track of, I think it’s safe to say that rock came out sound­ing not only alright, but per­haps even more rig­or­ously defined than at any other point in its now offi­cially geri­atric lifes­pan. Remem­ber the open­ing sec­onds of Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief back in 2005, that buzzy sound of a gui­tar get­ting plugged in and the nasty hiss of speak­ers. After Kid A and Amne­siac, it was like, oh, ampli­fiers! That was rock in the 2000s. What’s that crappy sound? Oh, rock! After a decade’s worth of electro-shock ther­apy and drain­pipes pos­tur­ing, the dirty, scuzzy nature of the beast still per­sisted like a bad per­son­al­ity trait.

That’s why, I think, WALL­creeper, a four-piece from Boston, sound so fuck­ing on. This is some gristly, pretty music, the kind of thing that makes you want to grow a beard, start a gar­den, and learn how to do some real motor­cy­cle main­te­nance. It’s not Zen, nec­es­sar­ily, and cer­tainly not Nir­vana. But, lis­tened to on the right pair of head­phones or shit-tastic car stereo, it’s not that far from either. If you planted these songs in the ground, they would sprout into really great-looking car­niv­o­rous plants.

Check out the A-side “Should Have Known Bet­ter,” the longest three-minute rock song of the year. These guys play at a dinosaur pace, slow, hun­gry, casu­ally dev­as­tat­ing, evolv­ing the track like a time-lapse photo of a tun­dra or some past-its-prime mill town. It sounds nat­ural, like dirt migrat­ing cross-country or stones erod­ing into weird shapes. Tremolo-picking, half-buried vocals, gas­troin­testi­nal bass rumblings…the whole thing accu­mu­lates like sed­i­ment sit­ting at the bot­tom of a river filled with liquor.

Peo­ple men­tion shoegaze when talk­ing about this band, and while there’s all kinds of Ride-ish echoes in the project, I think the tag is a bit reduc­tive, and not that accu­rate. Shoegaze was, from the Mad­ch­ester groups through My Bloody Valen­tine, and even today with look-backs like A Place To Bury Strangers, never really about dis­tor­tion and reverb and huge tex­tural washes, but about being a kind of club music for anti­so­cial white peo­ple who couldn’t dance. WALL­creeper grooves, for sure, but the mis­sion of this music is dif­fer­ent, closer, in my opin­ion, to groups like The Drones, or, hell, even The Dead Weather, in that it belongs in beer-reeking bars rather than actual par­ties, not as a tool for meet­ing fel­low dam­aged and ago­ra­pho­bic peo­ple, but an excuse to get into a brawl. There’s a bes­tial swag­ger to this style, inter­lock­ing gui­tar har­monies and feed­back duels and woolly-mammoth drums deal­ing dam­age rather than hooks.

Nowhere is this more appar­ent than on the B-side, the jus­ti­fi­ably 8-minute “Empty in the Eyes.” It’s rare that you want bands to work on this kind of scale, but WALL­creeper pulls off the epic so well that you won­der if the mp3-induced extinc­tion of the album track really was a tragedy worth revers­ing. It’s not so much that the ideas of the band need this much space to breathe, but that the sound itself, like aurora bore­alis or the Grand Canyon, is best observed in the open. Ris­ing, falling, ten­sion, release are the impor­tant com­po­si­tional com­po­nents here, so much so that I would argue “Empty in the Eyes” is less a song than a work­out in the best pos­si­ble sense, a deep-play exer­cise in atmos­pheric rock mea­sured on a geo­logic scale. The thing buries you.

The 2000s, I think, did a lot to tame the rock mon­ster. Riffs got com­pressed, drums got sequenced, vocals got auto­tuned. Con­sider WALL­creeper the glo­ri­ous antithe­sis to all that, a band that’s down to throw mud and shit all over it’s pla­ton­i­cally gor­geous songs. Fuck Spike Jonze. This is where the wild things are.

Ben Las­man

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