Today the debut album by Them Crooked Vultures is released around the world. Just another band pitching themselves into the ever-expanding void that was the music-buying public? Not quite.
Consisting of Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters), Joshua Homme (Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age) and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin...heard of them?), this is no ordinary group. With a masterful digital marketing campaign that seeded excitement over the world (thanks to a natty Google Earth plug-in on their website) at its back, and an end product that more than lives up to expectations, TCV aren’t so much the standard-bearers as the heavy artillery in the resurgence of Rock (with a capital ‘R’) in the dog days of 2009.
Let’s be honest, the mainstream has been awash with samey pop electronica for a year now, and as good as La Roux and Little Boots are supposed to be there is something very predictable about the anodyne way in which they have been sold to the public. The big labels know that they have to pick their runners in the digital age. That said, it’s not so much an indictment of the mediocrity of the current music scene as a testament to her ambition and modicum of conceptual thinking that Lady Gaga wiped the floor with all the acts at Glastonbury, backed by a Sunset Strip-lifted hair metal three-piece and fronted by some mean spark-throwing bazooka breasts that catapulted Madonna’s bullet bra into the 21st century.
Reacting against the synthetic trend, just as it did in the late eighties, Rock has mounted a potent counter-attack, not least in the form of the grunge generation as it enters its 20th anniversary and its denizens their middle-age. It didn’t start well with a moderate new album from Pearl Jam but Nirvana’s LIVE AT READING CD and DVD and reissued BLEACH still sound vital and Alice in Chains’s BLACK GIVES WAY TO BLUE has been rightly labelled a modern masterpiece of darkened introspection and granite heavy in a way they weren’t before. Biffy Clyro stepped up a gear with their most commercial effort to date, ‘Only Revolutions’, which also showed they aren’t afraid to pursue the long term view of quality album releases; an attitude that has ingratiated the mainstream to them as much as their sanding down of some of their more abrasive qualities.
Seeing Alice In Chains last night on the first of two dates at the Forum in London’s Kentish Town, the average age of the audience spoke to the fact that this is a band revisiting former glories, or rather being allowed the shot at glory they were denied with the decline in health and subsequent death of heroin-addicted lead singer Layne Staley. William DuVall is a more than able replacement, being capable of delivering the vocals of the old material with haunting echoes of his predecessor but with enough sheen and character to make the band new and vital again. Alice In Chains are a rock band’s Rock band, and their songwriting has endured where the machinations of fate have brought despair and now hope.
With Them Crooked Vultures, like Alice In Chains, it’s a case of in with the old, in with the new. It’s also similarly thrilling. Cold comfort it might be, but comfort it is. In these times of musical and cultural confusion – when Jamie ‘Afro’ Archer can dare to call himself a rock singer because he can howl through the back catalogues of Kings of Leon and U2 in the backrooms of a pub (NEAR YOU, KIDS) – the old guard mount their last stand in the battle for Rock’s integrity. It might turn out to be a losing battle, but let’s hope - at the least - for a Pyrrhic victory.
