Earlier tonight as I was making my way out of the Stampede grounds, I passed by an open-air concert at the Coca-Cola stage featuring some band called Treble Charger. I had probably heard many of their songs before, given that my roommate had a number of their albums playing on repeat last year, but only distinctly recognized one of them. Naturally I refer to “American Psycho”, upon hearing which I thought something along the lines of, “Oh, these guys.”
Given that they are a vanilla rock band that plays at exactly one dynamic level and perhaps even one key, with a somewhat rudimentary chord vocabulary, they were actually pretty good by vanilla rock standards. True, they resorted to jumping up and down on stage to mask the fact that the sounds they produced were sitting. True, their songs were indistinguishable and completely forgettable, minus the one I mentioned earlier, which is a clear demonstration of why people came up with the term “one-hit wonder”. However, one could not fault them for their raw energy and sizzling guitar solos, and the fact that the music they played – however repetitive and unoriginal – was still somewhat within the realm of music, which is more than I could say for much of the contemporary crap on the airwaves.
One has to wonder, however, how bands today don’t understand why music piracy is so rampant, when the answer is rather obvious: their albums are not worth buying because when you’ve heard one signature song, you really have heard them all. Modern poppish-punkish rock still has some sense of melodic-harmonic interplay, which is good, even though rock stopped rolling three decades ago (unless you count rolling in its grave). The problem, however, is variety. The Beatles were brilliant in their Please Please Me era of building on the sounds of their predecessors, but what made them stand out from the rest of the pack was that they went so far beyond that. Anybody can find a favourite Beatles song if they looked hard enough, because they did absolutely everything. There is hardly a band today that is developing like that; and the increasingly experimental ones like Radiohead are perhaps losing musical maturity as they go along, not gaining it as they should.
What rock – mainstream or otherwise – needs nowadays is a powerhouse songwriting team, like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, without whom Elvis would’ve hardly been an Archduke. Perhaps the one-hit wonder phenomenon can be squarely attributed to the fact that there’s no consistent source of inspiration that can lead bands like Treble Charger to stumble upon a second unique melangé of melody, harmony and incomprehensible lyrics like they did with “American Psycho”, the memorability of which likely has something to do with the existence of a book and film by that name, but furthermore rests on how it isn’t as generic as everything else. Still generic, but not as much.
Stay tuned for a thematically similar review of the generic but well-made Pirates of the Caribbean, which I saw yesterday.
