First time I heard about Alt-J, the fast-tracked Mercury Prize winning group that’s gained lots of popularity over the past year with their debut album, my friend said they had been compared to Pink Floyd. This peeked my curiosity, and I took to Spotify to screen their music.
I was suspect of my friend's misplaced opinion because I knew he hadn’t spent much of his life actually listening to Pink Floyd. He’s more into hip hop and just recently discovered the Grateful Dead. But since Alt-J are scheduled to play at NYC’s Governors Ball festival in June and we’re both going, I wanted to check them out.
And yea -- this band doesn’t sound like Pink Floyd. Ungodly amounts of weed wouldn’t even come close to convincing me of that. But I could tell how some people might perceive them as being so with their “trippy” and “eclectic” songs, if you think trippy is four dudes tapping away at keyboards and drums in the most banal way possible.
But just picture a band being fronted by a handsome, normal-looking dude who happens to sing like a mix between Smigel from Lord of the Rings and Dave Matthews, but backed by a group that is steeped in today’s booming, worldview, rhythm and sample-based musical styles -- just in the most watered down way possible.
They are Animal Collective without the weird time signatures, feral qualities and interesting song structures. They are “Mumford and Sons meets heavy beats,” as lead singer Joe Newman said in a recent interview. They are a shallow amalgamation of indie music at this point in the 21st century. And they sure as hell aren’t anywhere near Pink Floyd. Their official biography even goes on to ambitiously state that they sound like “In Rainbows era Radiohead.” They even have the word “alt” in their name. Unintended irony?
This is a band that debuted in the Top 20 last year and peaked at number 3 on iTunes. They are about to embark on a victory lap tour of summer festivals and currently litter Spotify commercials with plugs of their album, “An Awesome Wave.” They speak about their music very specifically, dubbing it “Folktronica,” and go out of their way to point out the musical interludes on their albums, like they invented them. They look like every fortunate white kid who grew up with hip hop and recently discovered music from third-world countries, incorporating it into their own. You could see what these U.K. art students who occasionally dabble in hallucinogens were going for. Watching them live and listening to them, it’s like they never had serious ambitions in music and then one day someone online happened to find their music and here they are.
Every so often, a band comes along and changes music by challenging listeners and rewards by showing them where music can go. The consequence of that is being assaulted with a million generic clones, many who gain more praise than their predecessors. An easy pill to swallow for the masses. After Radiohead’s OK Computer came Coldplay, who road to the top of the charts in the early 2000s with enough confidence and ambition just as the last of good strain of mainstream music acts were disappearing for good.
Now the mainstream is gone. And Coldplay is much better than these guys. I actually like a lot of Coldplay songs. The product though just seems to be getting worse and worse.
Since then, independent music, which has generally indicated where popular music is headed, turned to a more grounded, organic feel -- at least to me -- with the popularity of traditionally American music like Wilco, Bright Eyes, Death Cab and stuff of the more singer-songwriter variety. Soon after a band like Mumford & Sons comes along and capitalizes on all of that -- sad as it all is. To most of the world that doesn’t follow all music closely, they seem like first comers of their kind to much of the world.
In the past five years, electronic music through a world perspective has been peaking in independent and popular music. This is where Alt-J gets their chance, now that the terrain for this musical palette has already been tested by those who came before them; they can come in and find much success. Your average music listener will think they are the next Pink Floyd or Radiohead, and that is what should piss you off.
You might be like, wouldn’t it be worse that bands sound like Maroon 5, Creed, Rihanna, or Lil Wayne? Shouldn’t we be happy that musicians are mimicking music that is in better taste?
It’s not anything new that celebrated acts in the underground who never get enough recognition get ripped off by some second comer from a major label and they get all the credit for it. We see that all the time.
But Alt-J is different because they are on an independent label, Infectious Music, not on some monolithic music label like Universal. This type of BS is supposed to be carried out by major label goons, not pimped out by original, supposedly exploratory independent music labels.
On that note, I leave you with the one Alt-J song I like, ‘Dissolve Me." Further apologies to contributor and Alt-J fan Alicia Greco for this article.
