Musical movements churn back on a 20-year wheel, but you can’t be sure what genres will withstand the tumults of time. I never thought the electropop of 1980s mainstays Erasure, OMD and Japan would find footing in the aughts, but chillwave bands Panda Bear and Neon Indian proved me wrong. I expected hair metal to make a comeback, but it didn’t – probably because Poison and Motley Crue never went away.
You can’t out-Poison Poison, after all.
I’ve been curious to see if grunge, now 20 years removed from it’s shining year, would tunnel its way back. While it hasn’t as of yet, the genres which made grunge happen — shoegaze, noise rock, no wave — are popping up nowadays like Whac-A-Moles. On Secret Wild, the latest release from Guillermo Sexo (again, what’s with the band names?), the Boston band pays its respects to Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine while trying its best to move toward Pearl Jam. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
The Sonic Youth overtones are appreciated yet expected – aside from hailing from Kim and Thurston’s stomping grounds,
Guillermo Sexo’s latest effort was produced by Moore collaborator Justin Pizzoferrato. Opening track “Color The Noise,” once it loses its generic surf beat, becomes the ultimate Sonic Youth riff – with Noell Dorsey’s spoken word lyrics highlighting the swirling musical mass around her. “Smoke Signals” employs this same attitude but at a more sedate pace, as Reuben Bettsak’s guitar work melds nicely with Dorsey’s stirring singing.
Wait, did you say Pearl Jam? I sure did. The under two-minute gem “Green Eyes,” a hard-driving song showing a band not afraid to color outside the lines, could have been an outtake on Vs. “Leave Us” is relentless and fun (like Pearl Jam used to be before evil TicketMaster ate its soul), always moving ahead before ending in an exhaustion of cymbals (side two of Ten, back when albums had sides, is like this).
But when Guillermo Sexo isn’t chord-referencing, the album slows to a crawl. “Secret Wild,” with it’s repetitive and typical acoustic guitar, isn’t helped by Dorsey’s somnambulant delivery. The quiet “Exhale” is rote and boring – it wants to be Julee Cruise but instead comes off as Pablo Cruise (I too did not think that sentence was possible).
This is Guillermo Sexo’s fourth album, so the band has an idea of what it wants to be. But Secret Wild doesn’t tell me where the band wants to go — just where it’s been, which is a shame. I sense this is a band that could go much further with the right push.
