Title:Concrete Dunes By: Grandaddy Released by: Lakeshore Records Released on: February 19, 2002 Rating (out of 10): 8 Date: 02/27/2002
The Real New-Millennium Punk Rock
By and large, nostalgia fueled the best music of 2001. Bob Dylan mined America’s ragtime, vaudeville, and blues roots to produce Love and Theft. Ryan Adams aped the Rolling Stones and Neil Young on Gold and walked away with a critical success. Same with Alicia Keys’ mimicry of Stevie Wonder on Songs in A Minor. Daft Punk resurrected the kitschy dance club anthems of the late '80s and early '90s, drenched them in vocoder and tried to pawn them off as Discovery. Jay-Z, Lucinda Williams, the Shins, the Avalanches—all guilty of steeping their music in unrepentant nostalgia.
Of course, the most grievous error of the music media came in the form of hype toward the so-called new generation of punk rock. The Strokes don’t make horrible music, but they owe everything to Television, the Stooges and a jones for the Buggles and Katrina & the Waves. Nonetheless, there they were on magazine covers before their debut album even launched. The same hipsters awarded equal hype to the White Stripes (who reinvented Led Zepplin as the Sex Pistols) and the Moldy Peaches (a.k.a. the Germs fan’s Tenacious D).
But somewhere toward the end of 2001, a little band called Fugazi quietly released the best album of their career, in the form of The Argument, and showed all the whippersnappers what it really means to rock punk. Instead of relying on the aesthetic, they went back to the meaning. The album emerged full of ferocious rhythm, anger channeled through melody, and relentless energy.
No one would call Grandaddy punk rock—at the turn of the millennium, their album The Sophtware Slump rattled and whispered like a post-apocalyptic OK Computer—but maybe they should. Grandaddy’s Concrete Dunes, a collection of “rarities, imports, previously unreleased, and out of print tracks,” does as much to advance the form and idea of punk rock as The Argument by reveling in a hard-edged simplicity—abrasive and heavy on impact. Strangely, the album never revs up past a dull roar, except when vocalist Jason Lytle screams “You bore me to deeeeaaaaath” toward the end. But it always feels loud, fast, urgent and raw, like a mind-blowing seven-inch you found at the back of the rack by some band called the Greasy Orgasms or Apeshit that you knew you’d never hear about again.
Each track on Concrete Dunes hinges on a butt-ass simple arrangement. Acoustic and electric guitars fall into droning rhythms and the vocals stick to simple patterns, but Grandaddy rise above mere dull repetition to achieve the hypnotic grace of good hip-hop. They undercut tracks with cello, piano and even synthesizers without ever losing a single song’s intensity. On “Wretched Songs,” a crushing wave of fuzz breaks away and Lytle pleads, “My heart it sits inside me/ it don’t know we’ve said goodbye, you see,” and the vocals seem louder than the preceding crunching guitar. “Sikh in a Baja VW Bug” begins as beat poetry and whips up into a frenzy arranged around a whiney vocal hook. The opening track, a slow, forceful acoustic song called “Why Would I Want to Die” never loses the weight of its title and sets the bar for the rest of the compilation.
However, the whole of Concrete Dunes is greater than the sum of its parts—odd, because Grandaddy didn’t record it as a cohesive album, but they maintain a consistent aesthetic that never gets dull or ordinary. The quieter you play the music, the more it benefits. Those hypnotic rhythms can creep into your subconscious much easier than they can assault you when you listen directly: The punk rock chill-out record. Somehow, Grandaddy manage to edge themselves ahead of the Strokes and the White Stripes of the world in terms of originality and progression. They may not have the hype, but they got the chops.
Addendum:From Grandaddy’s official website (http://www.grandaddylandscape.com):
“It has been brought to our attention that Will Records, our former label, is planning to release a "new" record by "us" on February 19, entitled Concrete Dunes. Please be advised that this album arrives without our input or knowledge. It consists primarily of The Broken Down Comforter Collection, which I have usually seen in stores for less money than Concrete Dunes is selling for. We were not involved in the decision to rerelease or repackage this album. We first saw the incredibly questionable artwork, title, and new track listing on the internet, after being given the heads up by a friend. The additional material does not merit a rerelease in our opinion, and could be considered grossly opportunistic. I think that it's probably illegal for us to discourage you from buying it, so I won't actually verbalize that sentiment. Again, at the risk of sounding incredibly redundant, we have nothing to do with the release of a record entitled Concrete Dunes. Pleasant afternoon to everyone.”
