This new appreciation for soft rock and sedative New Age made sense as a paradigm shift within the rock dialectic. While initially an invigorating break from late \u201990s alt-rock blandness, what could be more conventional, played-out, and old hat by 2008 than the standard, White Stripesy palette of \u201craw,\u201d \u201cdirty,\u201d \u201cwarm\u201d? Not that those received associations have ever gone away entirely: They\u2019ve just wound their way through to the beyond-exhaustion point of what I call \u201cStudio Dirty,\u201d and young bands modeled on this obsolete value system still trundle forth to play the lower rungs of festival line-ups.<\/p>\n
Having said all that, when I finally clapped ears on Suburban Tours in spring 2010, it didn\u2019t strike me as dull or numb or vacant. It sounded exciting, tingling with feeling, ecstatic. And in a funny way, the record does involve qualities traditionally valorized in underground rock. The sound is rough around the edges; distortion is involved. Suburban Tours is audibly a DIY record, home-made on dirt-cheap equipment, and in no way resembles something cooked up (coked up?) by the Doobie Brothers<\/a> at Sunset Sound Recorders.<\/p>\n But I could see what Joe Knight was getting at with \u201cdull, numb, and vacant\u201d\u2014there\u2019s a serene, empty-headed glide and glisten to the sound. He was living in San Francisco when he recorded Suburban Tours, initially just as a creative outlet from a series of soul-deadening jobs. But as the songs accumulated, the vibe that emerged reminded him of Texas, the home state he\u2019d only recently left behind. The guitar sound has the frazzled dazzle of suburban sprawl in the Sun Belt. Listening, you almost feel like shielding your eyes from light glancing off windows and car roofs and the surfaces of swimming pools.<\/p>\n As the record coalesced around a mood, Knight started to title the tracks after subdivisions where he\u2019d grown up: neighborhoods with names like \u201cDeerfield Village,\u201d \u201cBear Creek,\u201d \u201cWoodland Hills,\u201d and “Glencairn\u201d that gesture towards the wilderness they\u2019ve replaced. He titled \u201cGolden Triangles\u201d after a mall near Denton he used to visit as a kid when staying with his grandparents. \u201cOut Past Curfew\u201d references the regulations that kids love to flout in American towns, even when there\u2019s not that much to do out there after dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This new appreciation for soft rock and sedative New Age made sense as a paradigm shift within the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278,64361],"class_list":["post-190902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-sunday-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}