Pop Culture Digest

Six New York City bands worth their salt OTHER than the Strokes
By John MacDonald

We’ve all heard the story. Five skinny-ass white kids from the Big Apple skip out on college, spend all their money on vintage clothes and Budweiser, stay up late writing songs about getting laid and staying up late, secure residency at the Mercury Lounge and release a three-song EP (2001’s “The Modern Age”) in England (the album’s cover featuring a woman’s naked bum becoming positively unavoidable throughout the London Underground). They become the toast of hipsters and release the full-length Is This It later that year. They become the toast of critics and the bane of hipsters. Spin decides they are the 2002 band of the year. In brief, this is the story of New York’s garage heroes the Strokes, a band whose choppy riffs and cute faces have finally turned the music media’s notoriously lazy eye away from nu-metal and teen-pop and toward a kind of rock that, though more substantive, is no less marketable.
Thankfully, the Strokes aren’t the only band that have benefited from such a change of heart. Maybe the best thing the fivesome have done is shed some much-needed light on all those other hard-working musicians whose fathers neither worked for modeling agencies nor penned pop tunes for Julio Iglesias. Much like what Nirvana did for Seattle in the early ’90s and the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays for Manchester a few years earlier, the media explosion which accompanied the rise of the Strokes has given more exposure to the groups next door.
Hence this brief, a bit arbitrary and by no means exhaustive list of bands which have made New York more then just a place for national tragedies and protest marches. My only concern is that this piece will serve simply as fuel for the journalistic engine hungry to turn New York into another “scene” destined to rise precariously for a few years only to fade silently away. Not all of these bands, Le Tigre for instance, began their recording careers post-Strokes, nor do they, as is often the case with “scenes,” all sound alike. In fact, much of their import lies in their refusal to be categorized.
Here, in no particular order, are six quality bands of various ages and ideologies that, if they serve no other purpose, make the Strokes media frenzy a little easier to bear.

Interpol
Latest Release – Turn on the Bright Lights
(Matador 2002)
Dressed in suits and ties, this foursome took goth punk’s traditional industrial warehouse home and transformed it into a champagne-sipping VIP lounge. Interpol’s eminently danceable rhythms and beautifully angular dueling guitars, as well as front-man Paul Banks’s deadpan wit make them one of the most exciting indie bands to come out of New York since the post-punk sounds of Television.
Interpol spent much of last winter recording their full-length album in Connecticut’s Tarquin Studies — a facility located on the top floor of a century-and-a-half-old home that once served as a hospital for mentally-disabled children. Not surprisingly, Interpol’s experience with New York made them feel right at home. Though frenetic as hell, Turn on the Bright Lights is jam-packed with dense melodies and Banks’ sordid tales of wine, women, and New York subways — a fine soundtrack for a troubled city.

Calla
Latest Release – Televise
(Arena Rock 2003)
With their purring guitars, distorted beats, and Aurelio Valle’s hushed vocals, Calla easily takes the prize for the darkest of these five acts. Since their self-titled 1999 debut, this trio, originally from Texas, has produced a harrowing sound easily suited to any back alley or late-night subway ride. Televise, though not quite the horror show their two earlier discs were, is filled with enough pathos to fill an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Think a tighter Cowboy Junkies or Mazzy Star with Nick Cave at the mic.

The Walkmen
Latest Release – Everybody Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone
(Star Time 2002).
(Also look for their split with Calla released last year on Troubleman Unlimited)
Everybody deserves to get lucky — especially in New York. Somehow pulling enough investment money together, these five twenty-somethings managed to rent themselves a large Harlem industrial space and transform it into a 24-track analogue recording studio. Armed with their brand-new "Mercata Recording" studio, they set to work on the songs that would eventually make up their 2001 self-titled EP and their later LP, Everybody Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone.
The Walkmen, three of whom hail from the now defunct Jonathan Fire*Eater, have always taken a novel approach to instrumentation — their first gig included an upright piano, a lap steel guitar and two tape machines — and their full-length debut is no exception. Overripe pianos shimmer and twinkle, violins whimper, organs hum, cymbals crash at odd moments and Matt Barick’s clanging guitar bounces of the walls of their expansive studio like an errant BB. All the while Hamilton Leithhauser’s wonderfully intoxicated vocals reel on and on about his packed days and living with his cronies in the city that never sleeps.
Despite their unfortunate spot on a recent VW commercial — hey look what it did for Nick Drake’s posthumous career! — the Walkmen give one every reason to hope for a better alternative rock tomorrow.

Le Tigre
Latest Release – Feminist Sweepstakes
(Mr. Lady 2001)
A list of New York bands to watch would be remiss without a nod to Kathleen Hanna’s electro-punk trio. Without missing a New York minute, Hanna has maintained her Riot Grrrl flair and feminist politics while adding a few dance beats into the fuzz box aggression of her defunct and massively influential band, Bikini Kill.
On the uncompromising Feminist Sweepstakes, Hanna rants about trendy activists and “dyke march[es],” while her bandmates dish out some disturbingly catchy melodies that would add pep to any road trip, house party or late night term paper. If anything, Le Tigre brings some much needed political discourse to an all-too-often vacuous pop music world.

Radio 4
Latest Release – Gotham!
(Gern Blandsten 2002)
With a leftist message as radical as Le Tigre’s, this heavily Mission to Burma-influenced fivesome dropped a bombshell when Gotham! hit stores last year. A ferocious blend of British punk, dance hall, and reggae, Radio 4 take protest rock to places it has rarely gone before. Anthony Roman’s vocals recall the ghost of Joe Strummer while fellow singer and guitarist Tommy Williams slashes away at his Telecaster like Strummer’s mate, Mick Jones. It’s a wonder these boys aren’t from across the pond. Radio 4 dishes out a call to arms against everything from police brutality to shallow pop culture while their broad instrumentation shifts easily between break-neck punk and red-eye dub reggae. With a knack for getting the crowd involved at every show, Radio 4 have developed into an impressive live act since their 1999 debut. Without a doubt,they are the opening act for the Clash reunion tour that never was.

Aerial Love Feed
Latest Releases – look for their as-yet-untitled, five-song debut EP in March.
Rejecting the camaraderie that seems to surround most of the bands in the city, Aerial Love Feed openly referred to their New York City rock peers as “adversaries” in a recent New York Press interview. Such a sentiment is understandable given the group’s resolutely unfashionable music. A blend of My Bloody Valentine drone, industrial electronica and dance loops, the four members of Aerial Love Feed have staked out a musical territory few have tread in the wake of such garage-rockers as the Mooney Suzuki and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The demos for the tunes slated for a slot on the unsigned group’s upcoming EP aren’t the kind of nostalgia pieces those bands revel in. Instead, they look to the industrial rock of early Nine Inch Nails and Jesus and Mary Chain — an aesthetic only half a decade old. Definitely the band to watch in the next few months.