One wouldn’t exactly call it a wave, more of a ripple, but the sound of classic US alternative rock – the lineage that stretches from Dinosaur Jr, through Drop Nineteens, into Superchunk and countless other bands – seems to be cropping up again.
There always seems to be one band on every indie bill who have walked straight out of 1993; singles by groups who were barely born at its moment of maximum popularity drop weekly. Spider Bags predate this – they formed a dozen years ago – but it makes their fifth album sound more of-the-moment than the previous four, not least because its opening track, Reckless, perfectly embodies that heavy, heavy slacker sound (for the first time in decades, the name “Das Damen” entered my head, unbidden). Dan McGee has an eye for an arresting line, too. “He met a girl with a pentagram tattooed on the front of her neck, and she knew automatically and magically that they were connected,” begins My Heart Is a Flame in Reverse, which reverts to the askew country rock of their earlier albums. Curiously, the theme of walking on water recurs: self-evidently in the old-fashioned punk rock of Tonight, I Walk on the Water, more subtly in the fantastic Burning Sand, which gives biblical references from Matthew (14:22 and 14:31) – the passage in which Jesus crosses the lake on foot.
For those who wondered if there was still a place for lazily fuzzed guitars: O you of little faith, why did you doubt?
