There comes a time every ten or twenty years, when history needs to take a bit of time off to correct come of its biggest mistakes before anyone important notices; we all need this time every now and again, when the corpses are piled so high around us that escape is impossible. We need to step back from reality and search for meaning and truth; or at least, that's what we disguise it as. Truthfully, we're looking for the exact opposite; everyone in the world wishes that the skeletons in their closets mean nothing, and that life will go on giving them time to make things right for all eternity. But the sad and surprisingly obvious truth is that if we had an eternity to right all the wrongs of our first lifetime, we would end up with nothing more than an eternity of wrongs; there's no balance in our mortal hearts. The capacity for good is nothing more than theory; in reality, the only truth we're looking for is a deeper grave to hide the stiff and rotting corpses of our past.
And I'm not talking about us simply as humans beings, but as society at large, and in individual compartments of life. Every now and then the art community takes a little time off from acting infuriatingly pretentious to hide all of its biggest mistakes in the roomy cellar of its empty mind, and once in a while our country's history books are re-written ever so slightly, so that people won't notice things like the incredible incompetence of FDR, or the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs. People don't want to remember things like that. You have all, without exception, re-written your own pasts to suit your ever-changing whims. This isn't to say that you cast everything in a good light, but merely that you cast everything in a light at all. Facts are cold, hard and unchanging, and any "view" of these facts is inherently wrong, because we lack the ability to be objective about even the slightest thing. People who claim objectivity are false, and should be drowned in their own snot, which, undoubtedly, there is a good supply of. No, our worlds are based on perception, and therefore no one will ever see exactly eye-to-eye on every subject. Which isn't to say that it's impossible to understand where your opponent is coming from, but rather that it's impossible to understand where...
hold on...
I think I've led myself in a circle. What was I talking about?
That's right, I was about to tie it all in to my major point.
So in our own individual sections of life, we go back and cast things in whatever light we see fit, which, I think I might have proven, is always wrong. Our high school years are a prime and painfully fresh example of this; in about twenty years, we'll look back to our teens as a haven from the toils and hardships in out adult lives; but for now, we view this disgusting time as something to escape from, rather than escape to. Of course, this might also have something to do with the fact that our lives will get progressively worse and worse as the years continue until we're nothing more than broken and empty vessels which once carried life and love, but now everything's been poured onto the unforgiving concrete of reality and we're left with nothing but our shells to keep us company until we finally breathe our last.
We go through these revisions in our nation; our country; our art; even our own lives. So why not our music? Well, what holds true for art and politics holds true for music too; think of the Sixties. Think of the jazz age. Think of all these eras and epochs in music, marking important dates in our universe's musical history; each time wiping the slate of all the garbage that had been dumped on it over the past several years and at the same time beginning to dump an even fresher pile of garbage on it.
Well, I think the time is coming for another of these cleansings. Ever since the Seventies, music has been slowly circling the toilet drain and it's about to go down. But as we all know, once a toilet's been flushed, it begins to fill up with new, supposedly fresher water. There are bands emerging now who are entirely different from anything we've heard of before; bands that will blow your mind and the minds of all your indie friends.
And let me get one thing straight before I go on, I am NOT talking about indie music. Indie is just the dying gasp of an already stiff era of music, which is fortunate, because that indie stuff really is crap. All over the world you'll find jerks sitting on hilltops with guitars, singing the same songs and somehow convincing themselves that these formula songs about love and life are making them more unique than everybody else. In fact, the songs are doing the exact opposite; turning your common freak into a pretentious little "indie" kid and then trying to do the same to you. No, this new wave of music will cleanse the world of indie and all the other garbage we've managed to rack up over the past few years. Of course, there will always be a small, exclusive "indie" crowd, forever and ever, amen.
Just like we've still got punks and goths and preps and hippies; every new era leaves a few footprints behind, for us to remember it by. But soon the indie kids will move on to the next fad, leaving only the geeks and die-hards to wallow in the formula sound of the repetitive songs.
One new band in this oncoming tidal wave of music is called The Shackeltons; named, of course, after the famous arctic explorer. They're never going to be famous, but I think they'll leave seeds in a good number of other people before their last gasp, and who knows what those people will accomplish? I heard of them from my brother, Andrew, and I've bought their only CD, which means I know more about them than the average listener at least. But all these facts and statistics are garbage; I gain nothing from them but strife and anger. Truthfully, I really want to talk about the music itself, not the means to the music.
The Shackeltons is the next in a long line of bands with singer who sort of half-sings/half-speaks, CAKE does that sometimes, and Dire Straits. It's an old tradition passed down from the forefathers of American music; the blues musicians. But The Shackeltons are very far from blues. They're very far from any definable style of music. And in point of fact, almost every band I've heard that uses that strange and lilting sing/speak quality in their singer has used it in a different way. CAKE is definitely different from Bob Dylan and Dire Straits, and THe Shackeltons are even more removed from those classic bands than most in that style. It's not really rock (at least by my definition of rock; it's an abused and overused word that's come to mean almost nothing in our time anyway). It's not screamo or heavy metal; honestly, I can't think of what genre The Shackeltons would be put into. But that's okay because the ridiculous nomenclature of the modern music industry has invented an entire new genre, for bands who are unique enough to escape the usual labels:
ALTERNATIVE.
I hate that word.
Anyway, The Shackeltons' music has this strange way of almost wrapping itself around the listener's brain as it plays; you can almost feel your thoughts beginning to pulse with the strange and esoteric sounds of the guitar as the singer cries out in anguish.
I could talk about the music itself for sixty pages and still not have described exactly what it feels like to me, but that's not what I want to do. No, I want to talk about the
lyrics. The Shackeltons' lyrics are some of the most heart-felt, and beautiful words I've ever read while looking up band lyrics online. The imagery and wording used in the song is perfect, and more than that; it's so original. They use love in ways I'd never heard of before, and they express it in ways that seem almost too real. Lyrics like "The robots purr like my favorite kittens, and I'm forced to love them ,even though it's with you I'm smitten." Once you get past the distracting imagery, it's really a beautiful little couplet, and the sincerity of the singers voice couple with the frenzied rush of the guitar and bass and drums builds up in your mind until you can do nothing but lie there, catatonic, struck by the beauty and love which you've never noticed in your own life.
And my favorite lyric from the Shackeltons is this: "I'd rather feel your soft heart than feel your soft skin." See, they just have this way of putting things; they're the next filthy step in the long and pointless evolution of music; they're going to end up being one of our new wave of music's lost bands; one of our dirty little secrets, erased from our memories by yet another wave of music. However, the Shackeltons will always hold a place in my CD collection, and their lyrics will maintain a special grip on my mind; the SJs and the NFs who follow us into this new era will leave them gasping in the dist as they cling onto the trendiest bands with the most hair and the most effeminate singers, but those of us who listen to music because we like it rather than because we like popularity will remember bands like The Shackeltons forever.
It's interesting how the trend-setters are always the ones who are left behind when the business starts to pick up. It's like driving the day after it snowed; there's a pair of tire tracks going all the way through the snow on the street, and we're driving on it, but the car directly in front of us is not the car that first left those tracks. No, it was hours back when the first car of the day left a faint impression on the cold, packed snow, but suddenly it was followed by hundreds more, enough to make it all the way down to the pavement. None of these cars are remembered by us. In fact, the only car that we remember is the one driving directly in front of us, but by the time it got there, the tracks were already fully established.
here's their website:
theshackeltons.com
