Musical movements churn back on a 20-year wheel, but you can\u2019t 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\u2019t \u2013 probably because Poison and Motley Crue never went away.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t out-Poison Poison, after all.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been curious to see if grunge, now 20 years removed from it\u2019s shining year, would tunnel its way back. While it hasn\u2019t as of yet, the genres which made grunge happen \u2014 shoegaze, noise rock, no wave \u2014 are popping up nowadays like Whac-A-Moles. On Secret Wild, the latest release from Guillermo Sexo (again, what\u2019s 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\u2019t.
The Sonic Youth overtones are appreciated yet expected \u2013 aside from hailing from Kim and Thurston\u2019s stomping grounds,<\/p>\n
Guillermo Sexo\u2019s latest effort was produced by Moore collaborator Justin Pizzoferrato. Opening track \u201cColor The Noise,\u201d once it loses its generic surf beat, becomes the ultimate Sonic Youth riff \u2013 with Noell Dorsey\u2019s spoken word lyrics highlighting the swirling musical mass around her. \u201cSmoke Signals\u201d employs this same attitude but at a more sedate pace, as Reuben Bettsak\u2019s guitar work melds nicely with Dorsey\u2019s stirring singing.<\/p>\n
Wait, did you say Pearl Jam? I sure did. The under two-minute gem \u201cGreen Eyes,\u201d a hard-driving song showing a band not afraid to color outside the lines, could have been an outtake on Vs. \u201cLeave Us\u201d 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).<\/p>\n
But when Guillermo Sexo isn\u2019t chord-referencing, the album slows to a crawl. \u201cSecret Wild,\u201d with it\u2019s repetitive and typical acoustic guitar, isn\u2019t helped by Dorsey\u2019s somnambulant delivery. The quiet \u201cExhale\u201d is rote and boring \u2013 it wants to be Julee Cruise but instead comes off as Pablo Cruise (I too did not think that sentence was possible).<\/p>\n
This is Guillermo Sexo\u2019s fourth album, so the band has an idea of what it wants to be. But Secret Wild doesn\u2019t tell me where the band wants to go \u2014 just where it\u2019s been, which is a shame. I sense this is a band that could go much further with the right push.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Musical movements churn back on a 20-year wheel, but you can\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[364,365],"class_list":["post-1298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-guillermo-sexo","tag-secret-wild"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1300,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions\/1300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}