http://slate.msn.com/id/2076408/

>
>The Return of Mope Rock
>New Order, the Smiths, and the first pop trend of 2003.
>By David Samuels
>Posted Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 10:11 AM PT
>
>All music snobs harbor a deep, dark secret-the music they loved
>before they became cool. Maybe it was that first Earth, Wind, and
>Fire tape. Maybe it was Chicago. Since I'm a big-hearted snob with a
>weakness for guitars, it makes sense that my own first love was
>Peter Frampton-a taste that has since passed into the realm of
>classic kitsch but that was at the time quite genuinely shameful. In
>college, my favorite bands were the Cure, the Smiths, and New Order,
>music that my roommates, girlfriends, and other intimates gleefully
>disparaged as the province of maladjusted kids from the malls.
>Important Music, they informed me, included Talking Heads, the
>Ramones, old George Clinton records, Bob Dylan, and the surrealist
>post-punk of the Pixies. The highest praise that might be eked out
>for bands like the Smiths and the Cure was that they made pleasant
>filler on John Hughes soundtracks. They would never be Important
>Bands. In 15 or 20 years, no one would want to sound like the Smiths
>or the Cure. So it was written.
>
>Well, the music snobs were wrong. There's a new generation of
>mope-rock bands, including Interpol, Matt Pond PA, and My Favorite.
>They are very clearly descended, respectively, from the Psychedelic
>Furs, the Cure, and the Smiths, who turn out to be every bit as
>worthy of note-for-note imitation as any of the proto alt-rock bands
>of the '70s. Just as the Strokes, the White Stripes, the Hives, and
>the rest of last year's vowel bands made it big by ripping off the
>Velvet Underground, a new crop of ambitious young musical scholars
>is seeking to please the Pop Goddess by plundering the Pretty in
>Pink soundtrack-making mope rock an early crossover trend-to-watch
>for 2003. Matador Records (the latest part of indie supermogul
>Martin Mills' ever-expanding spit-and-glue empire) is promoting the
>bejesus out of Interpol, and other labels are catching on fast. But
>is the music any good?
>
>In a moment where the recycling of the styles of 20 or 30 years ago
>has itself become the dominant style, it should certainly be
>possible for new bands to make some excellent mope-rock records for
>a generation that never heard of the Smiths, the Furs, or John
>Hughes. It is also heartening that the new mope rockers can
>typically play their instruments and handle complex arrangements of
>the type that would surely bedevil the Strokes. Like their
>sweater-punk contemporaries, the mope rockers of Generation Y are
>diligent scholars of the pop styles of yore. The problem here, as
>with the Strokes and the White Stripes, and even Wilco, is that all
>those long hours spent studying their older siblings' cool music
>seem to have robbed the new music of humor-a quality that the
>originals had in abundance.
>
>Interpol's first full-length album, Turn on the Bright Lights
>(Matador), was one of last year's biggest critical surprises: an
>album by a New York band that didn't sound anything like the Velvet
>Underground or Iggy Pop but was still named to a bunch of
>end-of-the-year Top 10 lists by Billboard writers and the other
>petty dictators who determine what the rest of us will be listening
>to in the coming year. And the hype is only getting heavier:
>Interpol is touring heavily this winter and this week will appear on
>the David Letterman Show, where viewers will be introduced to one of
>the three listenable songs on their new album. Interpol slavishly
>imitates the Furs-the same fuzzy guitar lines and the same
>portentous, flattened delivery. "Obstacle 1" is an educated gumbo of
>the Psychedelic Furs, New Order, and the Cars; and "Obstacle 2"
>isn't bad either. But even the lyrics to the good songs are
>deliberately muddy, an annoying tactic that makes you to lines like
>"Friends don't waste [something unintelligible] when there's words
>to sell." You're sure the missing word will mean something halfway
>interesting, perhaps arresting. When I figured out that the word was
>"wine"-"Friends don't waste wine when there's words to sell"-I was
>left instead with the disappointing sense that the lyrics had been
>poorly translated from the Czech.
>
>The only decent couplet I found comes on the album's best track,
>"PDA": "This is the only version/ of my desertion that I could ever
>subscribe to," chanted over a Furs-like drone in that that made the
>misfits in John Hughes movies seem so romantic. Since a band that
>simply sounds like the Furs is obviously a winning idea, saccharine
>ballads like "NYC"-"New York Cares"-suggest ambitious musicians in
>search of an anthem, but for the wrong city. Save it for Chicago,
>pal. Not content with the perfectly honorable work of being a
>Psychedelic Furs tribute band, Interpol insists on stealing from
>other bands whose sensibilities they understand even less. "Say
>Hello to the Angels" is a straight note-for-note steal from the
>Smiths' "This Charming Man," but in place of Morrissey's fey,
>self-mocking lines ("I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a
>stitch to wear"), Interpol gives us a guy bellowing about his
>"airspace." Rather than a frantic hairdresser in search of love,
>this is an annoying young bond trader shouting over the noise at a
>bar.
>
>Matt Pond PA is a more musically interesting (and frustrating) band
>than the knockoff artists of Interpol or the Strokes-a chamber pop
>group full of talented musicians who take musical cues from the
>Cure, New Order, Guided by Voices, and Stephin Merritt. As a
>songwriter, Pond is deadly serious about his craft, with results
>that are predictably hit and miss. On The Nature of Maps (Polyvinyl)
>the result is a combination of intelligent arrangements, dour,
>overwrought lyrics, plodding bass lines, and one of the best
>Cure-like songs I've ever heard-it's called "Closer." is great, and
>the cellos are gorgeous.
>
>The rest of the songs all blend together. The band itself seems to
>be particularly high on "No More," a perfectly nice little song that
>appears on the record twice-once with lyrics and once without. :
>"When the white oak has no answer/ turns its back on you/ the maple
>calls you/ shows you something new." Listen to the way it's sung in
>that stricken poet tenor, redolent with strain and loss. I like the
>instrumental version better. It is easy to imagine that Matt Pond PA
>might be someone's favorite band-but again, they're humorless.
>American mope-rock fans never understood that the shoe-gazing pose
>was always partly a put-on, that Morrissey and Robert Smith were
>also making fun of the ultra-dramatic emotions they enacted in their
>songs-a kind of rock 'n' roll cabaret for smart, sullen teenagers.
>
>It was that combination of irony, empathy, intelligence, and longing
>that made mope rock so listenable, despite the shoe-gazing and the
>dusty black clothes. What distinguishes My Favorite from its
>mope-rock mates is that the group doesn't allow their reverence for
>their source material to ruin their sense of humor. My Favorite also
>wisely decided to slavishly imitate the Smiths-a band that provides
>a much better songwriting model that either the Psychedelic Furs or
>the Cure. The bass player, Gilbert Abad, adds pleasant heft to songs
>that might have sounded thin without his relaxed, intelligent
>playing. It's a familiar story: the band that's clearly better than
>its like-minded peers but never gets signed to a decent label. So,
>they keep releasing music in dribs and drabs whenever somebody gets
>paid. It's too bad.
>
>My Favorite's recent series of EPs-Joan of Arc Awaiting Trial, A
>Cult of One, and The Kids Are All Wrong-contains plenty of
>well-crafted songs that use the familiar musical vocabulary of the
>'80s to capture the lives of suburban goth kids in the age of Prozac
>and Christina Ricci. Like the Smiths, My Favorite is a storytelling
>band, so the emotional territory can feel fresh, even when the
>underlying characters and plots are familiar. "Homeless Club Kids"
>unites upbeat synth-pop to dark, funny lyrics ("The ghosts of dead
>teenagers/ sing to me while I am dancing"). On Morrissey-like
>anthems with titles like "Le Monster" and "The Black Cassette," My
>Favorite prove themselves a worthy companion to their heroes.
>
>"At a seaside home for convalescence/ I took his name in vain during
>piano lessons/ Three nuns like shadows came and dragged me up the
>stairs/ then beat me black and blue with my book of prayers," says
>the doleful narrator of "The Lesser Saints." He closes with the
>lonely image that unites the Smiths, the Cure, the Psychedelic Furs,
>and New Order with their current crop of imitators. "I closed my
>eyes until they were gone/ and then fell asleep with my headphones
>on."
> It's not quite the Smiths. But it's not really such a bad imitation, either.

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