By It’s our Bandcamp Picks, featuring a pair of rippers in Elvis 2’s acid soaked garage rock record THANK YOU VERY MUCH and Dutch Interior’s eclectic dudes rock album MONEYBALL!
ELVIS 2 – THANK YOU VERY MUCH
Genre: Garage Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Mach 10,” “On The Motorway”
Nothing about ELVIS 2 as a project is all that serious. From the name of the record to the cheeky “its me baby oh yeah” in their Bandcamp bio, from the cover art’s fried 8-bit distortion to the fact that they offer a bleached version of the Skyhooks’ 1975 kitchen-sinked glam rock single “Million Dollar Riff,” THANK YOU VERY MUCH is the rare record where the aesthetics are dripping in so much crazed irony that it somehow comes out the other side with an acidic sincerity. Like the ‘90s-computer-graphic green slime on the cover would insist, these songs have been dipped in an acetone toxic goo, starting as tight proto-punk and power pop songs whose influences range from Death or the Saints to modern Aussie acts like Royal Headache or Eddy Current Suppression Ring, only to come out the other side smelted and melted. Tracks like “I’m A Dog” and “RPG” lean on blitzing-fast guitar parts and bassy, fuzzed-out vocals for 75-90 seconds, grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you with reckless intensity. Fusing this unrelenting pace with a greasy, blown-out static makes THANK YOU VERY MUCH something of a blur—standout “Mach 10” is, other than the cover, the longest song on the record and the only one longer than two minutes. Within that cut is perhaps the best diffusion of ELVIS 2’s many, many ideas and aesthetics, the sheer length giving us a prolonged look at some long, tough guitar solos while the rhythm section aggressively keeps an unstoppable tempo.
While the look and feel, even on a first listen, will seem like something of a novelty, I think THANK YOU VERY MUCH just rips too hard to ultimately be put in that bucket—that full-circle sincerity unlocks itself by the time you reach the noodly, Stooges-esque title track closer. And while at the end of the day I could write another 1000 words on ELVIS 2, nothing I will say will be as succinct or effective a selling tool as this eight word user review on Bandcamp: “Music to die on a toilet to (positive).” Give it a listen over on Bandcamp.
Dutch Interior – MONEYBALL
Genre: Rock, Alt Country, Freak Folk
Favorite Tracks: “Fourth Street,” “Wood Knot,” “Beekeeping”
When we say “dudes rock,” we are typically referring to a type of dude.
Oftentimes, we’re saying it in a musical sense. Thinking “hell yeah” to a song or performance you’re hearing or seeing, it’s a singular focus on something that is at once cool and genuine, striking but intelligible—we’re saying those two words because they capture a feeling. “Dudes rock,” you say to your friend about MJ Lenderman or Cameron Winter or any other newly minted dad rock bands. “Dudes rock” you say about the new Turnstile album. Be it a sound or a literal dude, it has become a timeless catchall shorthand that we shouldn’t abuse.
When we say “dudes rock” about Dutch Interior, though, we’re referring to six different dudes—I recommend watching their Pitchfork Perfect 10 Video to get a sense of them. They might be, in all seriousness, the most literal manifestation of “dudes rock” ever assembled. Sure, many bands have lots of dudes in them, but Dutch Interior is unique in that their own varied influences and styles are both on display and vividly captured on record and on stage. In March I watched this manifest live a total of four times between South By Southwest and Los Angeles seeing them open for labelmates Iceage. You’re seeing each of them take a crack at a song—five of the six members take on lead vocals at some point through the show, each performance different from the last. They jam. They groove. They rock. They tap into varied parts of, say, Los Angeles Americana, and head-down garage rock, and dizzying jazzy ambience, and piano ballading, and primitive, country-ish slowcore. They’re impossible to pin down, and they know it—just six cool dudes laying down paradoxical music that is current and abstract and hooky.
MONEYBALL, their latest, has become a breakthrough because it is a distillation of those many ideas you see on stage, and an album where many different sounds and ideas oddly click together for reasons that you kind of just chalk up to be magic. There’s the crown jewel, the standout single “Fourth Street,” perhaps the slickest alt-country rock tune released in years. There’s the slow-trotting “Horse,” which may as well be a long-lost Willie Nelson tune. There’s opener and closer “Canada” and “Beekeeping,” both listless ballads with a shaking hum to them, the former a stark, stripped-back slow burn rock song, the latter a hypnotic apocalyptic waltz with strings. There’s “Sandcastle Molds,” which is an asymmetric, Beck-ish art rock tune, and “Wood Knot,” which is a quiet campfire jam about domesticity. Writing about what every song on an album sounds like is often just reductive framing and lazy music writing. For MONEYBALL, though, it’s almost essential in trying to emphasize that these parts do, in fact, all come together into something brilliant. It reminds me of albums like My Morning Jacket’s CIRCUITAL or Girls’ FATHER, SON, HOLY GHOST, each track revealing a new idea that is more in conversation with the nature of the band and the idea of their sound rather than what came directly before it. That’s a tough needle to thread, but when a band does it well as Dutch Interior have, it’s magic. Dudes rock. You can check MONEYBALL out on Bandcamp.
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