Screeching Weasel
Louder Than Hell
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Don’t get me wrong: Some of my favorite albums this year are the product of the popular postmodern approach, including the funk-trip-hop-boho-soul-rock of Luscious Jackson’s Fever In Fever Out, the psychedelic-lo-fi-ork pop of the Olivia Tremor Control’s Music From the Unrealized Film Script “Dusk at Cubist Castle”, and the hip-hop-musique concrete-rock of Beck’s Odelay. But in each case, you have to be willing to make some significant detours before getting to the visceral rock kick at the center of the maze. With other hyphenated mixtures–say, the ambient-dub-jazz fusion of Tortoise or the techno-ambient-house-prog of the Future Sound of London–you never get there at all. These musics may be linked to rock intellectually, commercially, or socially, but there’s no actual rock in them whatsoever.
Screeching Weasel’s Bark Like a Dog and Manowar’s Louder Than Hell are not just straightforward examples of two of the most visceral rock genres–they’re sterling ones. Just as it’s as difficult to write a good sonnet today as it was in Shakespeare’s time, it hasn’t gotten any easier to make a truly powerful punk or heavy-metal album than it was when the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia or Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality came out. In fact, it’s probably harder to breathe new life into the formulas since so many pretenders have emerged in the years in between.
