White Denim - Relaxed

 

Last week I was very surprised to see a young and highly Punky band Fashion Tips warm up for their gig with a run through Steely Dan's Dirty Work. Now I like Steely Dan. Very much. But they seem to operate at cross purposes with anything with even the basic aspirations to Punk credibility which is surely something bands still aspire to. Maybe I'm completely out of the loop, but that was certainly the case once.

But this is 2023 and it seems everything is allowed. The Internet has democratized things to the degree that artists and bands feel free to wear a mish mash of influences on their sleeves that was hardly possibly in my day when people chose their beds and lay in them. These were barricades set up most obviously by Punk and maintained and  patrolled to a greater or lesser degree until the millennium.

Now it seems, anything goes. Take the new White Denim album, as first case for the prosecution. it's hardly 'cool' in the conventional sense. But I'm increasingly wondering whether any such thing exists anymore.

In the Eighties and you were an alternative band and you wanted to be considered cool, things were fairly straightforward. You just sounded like the Velvet Underground or The Byrds. Possibly, if you were slightly more adventurous, The Buzzcocks or Orange Juice. Nowadays, that's not the case at all.

White Denim come from Austin, Texas, a city with some musical heritage and a damned good musical scene now. They sound absolutely nothing like 13th Floor Elevators, the first significant band to emerge from here. In fact they sound like polar opposites. WD sound more like Steely Dan, and if that's an acceptable thing to do because everybody will admit the Dan were pretty good, they also sound like a lot of far more dubious things. West Coast mid-Seventies Jazz Funk atrocities that made right thinking Punks froth at the mouth. But, it all sounds perfectly OK in 2023.

I wouldn't buy Relaxed and I'd probably tire of its chord changes and slick, satisfied air after a few plays. I'd rather wait for the new Protomartyr album. This is alright. But now I want to listen to something else.