#184 - Celebration Celebration Time
Sasha Frere-Jones bemoans the abandonment of rock and roll by indie-rock groups. Has he listened to Stubbs the Zombie: The Soundtrack?
Here, in an odd miscegenation of eras and musics, of history and contexts, of analog and digital, of jukeboxes and Xboxes, we have various "alternative-rock" bands of the 1990s and 2000s performing covers of old 1950s rock and roll songs for the music to a video game.
What is most surprising and intriguing about the album are the ways in which the bands transform their imitations into new shadings of emotion and evocation. It suggests that there is plenty of pep left in the musical miscegenation machine of postwar American cultural democracy: the invisible republic slumbers on, one nation, indivisible, with groove and grit for all.
20 October 2007