Skip to main content

A Certain Trigger

I said it recently and I'll say it again: it's interesting how bands/records you initially pass on come back into your life. The latest one for me is Maximo Park. Frank at Chromewaves recently chimed in with similar thoughts on these guys too, so here's my story.

Sometime last year, Jason played me a clip of "Apply Some Pressure." Rolling my eyes at the sound of yet another British band on a non-melodic, post-punk bender, I didn't want to hear anymore of it. Fast forward to last week: I'm in CD Addict and Mark plays a song on their CD changer that really catches my ear. Sounding more like a cross between the brilliant, poppy post-punk of The Futureheads, the sunny pop of The Thrills and a touch of pop-punk ala Screeching Weasel, I was curious. Who was this band? The one and only, Maximo Park. And even more impressive, the song was a b-side called, "Fear of Falling."

Mark suggested I check out their debut album, A Certain Trigger, and a forthcoming b-sides collection entitled, Missing Songs. Hearing some more of their songs, I will freely admit that I shouldn't have passed these guys up so quickly. A Certain Trigger and Missing Songs showcase incredibly catchy pop with some dips into post-punk territory. Hearing this now is a lot easier than this time last year. Last year was a year where it was very easy for a band like this to be lost in the shuffle.

In 2005, modern bands with various odes to '79-'83 post-punk (whether intended or not) got a lot of write-ups in the press, especially the British press. I don't know about you, but I had about enough of it around SxSW last year with all the hoopla about Bloc Party. That was in March and there were quite a few other bands written up in the following months. While I absolutely love Silent Alarm and like a few of these dancey, post-punk-styled bands (especially Franz Ferdinand), a lot of other bands with a remotely-sounding post-punk feel got the shove-it-down-yer-throat treatment. To quote George Costanza: Oxygen - I need oxygen!

With my mind always wandering from band to band and record to record, trying to separate the great from the crappy in a big and hazy genre that I wasn't completely sold on was tough. I've never hated the skronky guitars and the disco drumbeats completely, but when they back a track that lacks the kind of spark that makes a song really powerful, I grow very impatient. Seeing as how certain media outlets and labels like to pump as much gas out of a filling station until the very last drop, I didn't want to wait around for that time to come.

Now with the moronic, "Like the Stone Roses in '89 and Oasis in '94" kind of hype around Arctic Monkeys, even more dancey post-punk is probably making its way through the hype factories. That's a big "oh brother" for me, but I really don't know. There could probably be another really promising band to come out of this current mining operation. Of course it's really up in the air as to where bands like Bloc Party, The Futureheads and Maximo Park will go next, but all these new trails shouldn't be seen as one big trail.

Comments

Eric said…
I really really like that Maximo Park record. I also really like the Arctic Monkeys record. You know I love the Bloc Party record. Sometimes giving things a second chance is a good thing. God bless Gang of Four for doing this sort of thing over 20 years ago.

Popular posts from this blog

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Catherine Wheel

Originally posted: Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 Despite managing to release five proper albums, Catherine Wheel was one of those bands that always seemed to slip past the mainstream rock crowd. Yes, they got some nice airplay in their day, but people seem to have forgotten about them. You may hear “Black Metallic” or “Waydown” on a “classic alternative” show on Sirius or XM or maybe even on terrestrial radio, but that’s about it. For me, they were one of most consistent rock bands of the ’90s, meandering through shoegazer, hard rock, space rock and pop rock, all while eluding mainstream pigeonholing. Led by the smooth, warm pipes of vocalist/guitarist Rob Dickinson (cousin of Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson), Catherine Wheel featured Brian Futter on lead guitar, Dave Hawes on bass and Neil Sims on drums. They weren’t a pretty-boy guitar band, but they weren’t a scuzzy bunch of ragamuffins either. Though the band hailed from England, Catherine Wheel found itself more welcome on American air

Hello, Control

I'm still a big fan of iTunes . I haven't tried Napster , Urge or eMusic as I've been perfectly happy with Apple's program ever since I downloaded it two years ago. However, an annoying new feature has come up with its latest version, 7.0. Whenever you pull up your music library, a sidebar taking up 3/4ths of the screen appears plugging the iTunes Music Store. Why is this an annoyance? Well, first and foremost, since you can't close the sidebar, you can't escape it. I believe a music library is a private collection, a spot away from the music store. So what's the need for constant advertisements and plugs? To provide a better visual, let me describe what I see whenever I pull up a song in my iTunes library. When I listen to "This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open" by the Weakerthans, I see a graphic for Left and Leaving , the album that it comes from (and available in the iTunes Music Store), along with a list of the Weakerthans' other albums,

Politics Shmolitics

Yesterday, the more pleas I saw for people to go out and vote, the more uncomfortable I felt. Plenty of the blogs I hit up everyday said something along the lines of "Vote and if you don't, don't complain." Folks, this is why I find discussing politics so alienating. There are plenty of reasons why I don't discuss politics on here or in my everyday conversations. The biggest reason is because I don't have a lot of interest in politics in the first place. By what I've seen, heard and read for the last eight years, political debates are usually pissing contests. Judging by the views I've processed, it would be easy to think that we're all slowly going downhill either on the left, right or down the middle. Yet I don't think we're going totally downhill or totally uphill. Debating the direction we're going seems futile, especially when adults start screaming at each other like they're in grade school. To my ears, political debates are s