Laptop rock retriever.

Once upon a time there was a band called Nirvana, and Nirvana did this funny thing where they took pop song structures but had loud and noisy choruses with quiet verses, "abstract" lyrics, and rather "heavy" instrumentation. They were not the first band to do this, and holy flying hell they were far from the last, but they did it with the greatest commercial success and are often credited for the less-appealing-in-retrospect "alternative rock" boom of the 1990s. Drummer Dave Grohl went on to even greater success with the more conventional, sometimes enjoyable but often bland Foo Fighters, as well as a potentially eclipsing 2nd career of being "nice rock guy that collaborates with lots of people but is still hella cool." He recently directed a movie called Sound City that is both a celebration of a now-defunct studio in Los Angeles where many influential records were recorded (including Nirvana's Nevermind) as well as a manifesto of sorts that the best and purest music is made by human beings with live instruments and imperfections as opposed to the modern trends of digital correction, sampled instrumentation, auto-tune, etc etc.

Some of those last two sentences might not mean a lot to some people reading this, but it is a certain fact that a lot of modern music is made with computers fixing mistakes and "fixing" recorded sounds to make "cool" new sounds (for example, sometimes auto-tune is used as an instrument of sorts to manipulate a voice into a different sound - for better or worse - and a lot of the time it's used to make a less-than-great singer sound too perfect in a studio environment. This person then has to live with the reputation of being a terrible live performer). Some people (including Dave Grohl) say that this trend makes modern music sterile and hard to listen to, and I don't disagree with them on most of this point. Other people say it's musical progress, and most people don't notice or care, they're just like "hell yeah, pass the Smirnoff". I blame many factors on this development, but it largely boils down to continued influence of "cutting-edge" records of 10 years ago (I'm thinking Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin and Radiohead's Kid A here) and the fact that record labels don't make much money these days and it's just easier to have producers digitally fix things for artists to get them out of the studio as fast as possible.

So... there won't be any blow and strippers in the studio tonight?

Every musical trend begats pale imitators, and while I enjoy the late 90s/early 00s work of Flaming Lips and, to a lesser degree, Radiohead, the last 10 years has been wrought with introverted people with mediocre levels of talent but patience with digital manipulation making blippy, whispy, "arty" music on their laptops and Pitchfork Media racing to blow themselves over which one them has achieved the highest level of dreariness. And lately this has gotten even more offensive with the success of this fucking asshole. But... I don't want to come across as a YouTube commenter on an Alice in Chains video and go on a diatribe about how nobody makes "real" music anymore and anything that's popular now is shitty, with an odd pre-occupation with Justin Bieber. There's still plenty of quality music out there, and, yes, I gravitate naturally towards more punk-influenced things and artists with more old-school approaches, but I think more and more people are figuring out how to use these tools in a way that doesn't result in immediate suckage. I also know that lots of my problems with modern "indie" music is in the fact that I despise clearly digital production in a "rock" context - for example, I recently saw a band cover MGMT's "Kids" with just guitar, drums, and horns and found it to be a rather kick-ass tune and almost regretted running down all those guys in scarves outside Espresso Royale with my car two summers ago.

Almost.

So, I've somehow been on a kick with the recently-released album Wondrous Bughouse by Youth Lagoon (named after the fact that not a single young person has a remote clue who Creeper Lagoon is). Youth Lagoon is everything I hate on paper - a solo project that is masked as a band made by an awkward dude in his parent's basement in Idaho or something - and the first record by the project (Year of Hibernation) went through my ears with barely a notice. But, call it the midwest winter, but Wondrous Bughouse takes these modern college-radio pretentions and puts it together in a way that nods to psychedlic artists of the past without wallowing in "my-Iphone-is-broken" weariness. "Raspberry Crane" is my jam of the moment, and the fact that it sounds like Steve Drozd could be on the drums is probably no coincidence for my enjoyment.

Does this excite me to go see Youth Lagoon live at some festival this summer? Probably not - I still feel that the domain of live music belongs to those who celebrate the imperfect "all-in" human instruments championed by Mr. Grohl in that there movie up to the top of the page, but, who knows, maybe (the rather awesomely named Youth Lagoon mastermind) Trevor Powers has the human urge to crank out a power chord on the ol' stage and I'll become some sort of Buddy Holly-glasses-wearing modern Dead Head. Now, in the meantime, I'll muse on that and check on my French press. Can't let it get cold and sterile.