Periodically, I like to tilt at windmills, especially the kind of windmill tilting that only irritates and sometimes offends those around me without ever accomplishing anything meaningful or substantive. Lately, one of my primary windmill tilting themes has been haranguing those friends of mine that won’t admit that certain local bands just aren’t good. My point, in these conversations, is that the vast majority of bands aren’t very good, and just because a particular band comes from our town or, even more to the point, has a friend or two in it doesn’t mean they are automatically awesome. Should we still support them? Of course! But let us avoid self-delusion while doing so. That’s all I’m saying. I just usually choose the least tactful way to voice my thoughts.
All this to say, when I saw the title of Capgun Coup’s first single off their forthcoming album, Maudlin, I felt a little vindicated. Mind you, this is not because I knew if the song itself would be any good, much less whether those folks would find themselves in agreement with me on my aforementioned windmill tilting, but simply because the title was “Bad Bands.” Fortunately, I can report that the song itself is pretty killer.
Whether the philosophy agrees with me, now, that is a different question. It is a lo-fi surf jam gem – a little cleaner, somewhat more direct than Wavves, say – and while I dig the distortion and gutter guitar, I can’t really make out the lyrics, at least not enough to determine definitively where the Omaha-based band takes their stand. So instead I just dig the hell out of the 2 1/2 minutes of cool and leave the close textual reading of “Bad Bands” to those of you in possession of either a copy of the lyric sheet or eardrums far less concert damaged than my own.
Capgun Coup’s Maudlin will be released on November 3rd by Team Love. In the meantime, you can pre-order a copy of the album here.
Fun tune! It must be pro-bad bands because the first lines are “Bad bands will always be the best, bad bands are better than all the rest” and they say that good bands got no soul. It really depends on your definition of “good” in relation to bands because I would say a band that is technically good but is boring and has no soul is actually bad, you know?
I generally like “bad bands” better than “good bands.” Give me a scrappy bunch of losers, ineptly pouring their melodrama into horribly conceived three-chord song structures and I’m happy as a clam. Take out melody and harmony and rhythm, leave me with unalloyed noise and anarchy and I’m a pig in shit. Drop rococo vocals interwoven with carefully finger-picked mandolin solos and multi-tracked into perfection drum lines on me and I’m fighting off the sleepies. Or whatever.
Daniwhat – Thanks for the translation! Your ears must be younger than mine. That or you are waaaay smarter than me and go the earplug route. And I TOTALLY agree with you re: soul mattering over technical skill. I’ll take Half Japanese over Joe Satriani every day of the week.
Brian – I disagree. Bad bands are bad. If they suck, that makes them bad. If they rule, that makes them good. You can have (and do) bad bands in every single genre – there are bad punk bands, bad hippie bands, bad twee pop bands, and so on. I’ll listen to the good ones, love the great ones, and boo the bad ones. Naturally, what makes one band good for me might be different for you, but in that case we aren’t arguing about supporting bad bands, we are disagreeing about what is good (and bad).
WTF is that their covered with in that picture????