AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD – “Source Tags And Codes”
The problem of boredom in alt.rock music is probably just the problem of me noticing boredom in alt.rock music more easily. (That’s the generous interpretation, anyway). I don’t hear musicians expressing anything much, and I don’t feel much need to express anything much back, since all I do hear is musicians wrestling with structures. If the structures are new enough to you then you might get a jolt anyway – the rock you like best is the rock you hear first, in other words, which makes rating individual bands a bit pointless.
But isn’t wrestling with structures interesting anyway? I don’t know – when I was writing the first sentence of this I put “(b-dum b-dum)” after “boredom” as a nod to the Buzzcocks and then I took it out because it didn’t do anything other than prove I’d heard the Buzzcocks. Most of what I hear in this music is a succession of similarly petty micro-choices. I can imagine someone settling for that, but I can’t imagine anyone being satisfied with it.