During this summer's Glastonbury, TV coverage cut to The Districts, a young American guitar band I'd never heard of before, playing 4th & Roebling the finely named opening track from their recent album A Flourish & a Spoil. The band didn't really hold my attention for the duration of the song. Generic might have been a word echoing around my head. It all seemed rather glum. I activated my democratic prerogative and zapped elsewhere.
I got back to them a few months later this week, giving their album a few plays while at work. It's a flawed record, though by no means without its virtues but it's mired most obviously in its musical and literary influences, known or unknown and the fact that what it's saying has been said before. Musically, most of all it reminds me of The Walkmen, a fine underrated band who I saw play an excellent set in their native New York City alongside Interpol in 2000. The Districts certainly bear the fingerprints of that wonderful scene directed and led most obviously by The Strokes that seemed to burst from nowhere at the time.
The band are a four-piece just out of their teens who hail from Lititz, Pennsylvania. A Flourish & a Spoil would not probably be something that its tourist board would care to use to attract visitors. It's classic smalltown stuff. Nothing to do. Little in common with those around you. Hanging round on street corners and in basements, unable even to dissipate the bored emotions welling up inside a local bar knocking back beer because you're under age. Yearning most of all to leave and start to live. Nothing new. This stuff goes back to Holden Caulfield and probably beyond. Disgust at all around them and really self disgust most of all. Teenage emotions. Valid ones sure, but probably things that it's better to work through your system before your insides start to rot.
In their album review Pitchfork do a finely tuned assassination job on the record its sound and the emotions it conveys. I'll quote the first paragraph to give you the general idea.
'The Districts’ appeal lies in how you can call them a "rock band" and have a typically vague term mean something specific. Or, maybe, they’re a throwback to the last time "rock band" meant something. All four members are under 21 years old and they play bar-friendly rawk with the irreverence and impatience of kids who still have to get drunk in the parking lot, replacing the classic rock and blues with mannish-boy punk vigor. They’re from Lititz, Penn., a town whose closest metro area is Lancaster, but they evoke New York in 2002, which itself evoked New York during a non-specific time in the late-'70s; think "Welcome to New York" with Taylor Swift swapped out for Julian Casablancas and Hamilton Leithauser and Paul Banks, a fantastical guided tour of art-damaged, post-punk, Koch-era NYC minus the clear and present danger. They’re a "the + plural noun" band. For those who felt the "New Rock Revolution" was exactly what its name promised rather than a revival of old aesthetics, the Districts' A Flourish and a Spoil signifies a restoration of order. For everyone else who simply likes rock bands, it's actually kinda quaint.'
A great piece of well phrased, deeply cynical music criticism, if a tad cruel. On their website the band themselves write, rather less cynically:
'We're The Districts.We're from a little town called Lititz, Pa. We write honest music and are passionate about doing so.'
Who could possibly object to that? It's what artists or those aspiring to become artists ought to do. In the couple of interviews I've read with them they are all teenage enthusiasm for the music they love and that inspires them. Much less jaded than their record occasionally sounds which bodes well.There's some definite, novelistic talent on A Flourish & a Spoil. As I've implied already it's their small, imperfectly formed Catcher in the Rye and I imagine they'll improve on it in terms of finding their way towards their own voice over the years and their career to come. They've already done the difficult bit. Fought their way out of Lititz, PA. Onwards and upwards!
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