Friday, October 9, 2009

Back to the Future: How the ‘90s Infiltrated the ‘00s.

The alternative music scene has often looked to the past for inspiration. In the ‘80s, the Jesus & Mary Chain and Echo and the Bunnymen respectively paid tribute to the Velvet Underground and the Doors, and that lineage continues to flourish to this day. A cursory listen to Brooklyn bands like Crystal Stilts and Vivian Girls offers two examples of bands strung somewhere in-between the territory mapped out in the ‘60s and the ‘80s, with influences amalgamated through obsessive listening to both leaders and followers. An entire decade stretched out before those ‘80s bands began plundering the past and, for a while, a 10-year stretch of silence seemed to be the normative passage of time before old sounds became fresh again and aging rockers began eyeballing a big bag of reunion swag.

Read full article here.