Generation next

Sunset would find us along Aurora Boulevard in the Vicor offices many years ago, trying to wangle vinyl copies of the latest rock releases from the record executives, particularly one Ces Rodriguez who held fort behind her desk in an airconditioned room full of cigarette smoke. One of the relatively new labels they were pushing then was Island Records, and among the artists on the label were a solo Steve Winwood on leave from Traffic, and the reggae pioneer Bob Marley.

Later U2 would also be a signature talent of Island, the angry young band from Ireland, a perfect match for the fledgling record company founded in Trenchtown, Jamaica. Now as fate and its varied tricks would have it, Island has again returned to the cutting edge (as if they never left) courtesy of at least a couple of young bands surely deserving of more than a passing listen.

The mysteriously named Thursday’s album War all the Time has a lot of psychic baggage that definitely does not make for easy listening. There’s a lot of ranting and raving going on, as if one were caught in a great big mosh pit and the swirl and crescendo of instruments assault even the sixth sense if one has ESP to spare. How else describe a band which has a song entitled, The Song Brought to You by a Falling Bomb, with solo piano and voice to drive home the bleakness. Perhaps one tune that would be suitable for radio airplay is Division St., which clearly draws the line in a class, religious, or ethnic war, or is it simply a matter of being on the wrong side of the tracks? There are pertinent excursions too in a seeming identity switch, as in the song Tomorrow I’ll be You, a theme worthy of the Replacements. Yet the ominous bass lines as if threatening to explode any minute, and the take no prisoners vocal work are more closely affiliated with the early U2, circa Boy and October, although Thursday updates the sound by incorporating rap metal-like bellows that spew fire, brimstone and tonsil.

More on the regular guy side and certainly not to be mistaken for terrorists is the band Hoobastank, whose rock is straightforward but no less tight. Think Green Day and Foo Fighters, and you get an idea of where this band is coming from. The guitars are assertive but never cluttered, chops and breaks clean as a whistle to the next bridge and coda. When the foreign music scene verges on a homogenized, extended version of MTV, Hoobastank refreshingly has no pretensions, and their album The Reason chockfull of tunes that can be enjoyed at the spur of the moment, albeit ultimately forgettable. Which is okay really because they make no claims of trying to change the world, hey mon, they’re just trying to cobble together enough songs for a decent CD. The thoughtful, melancholic title cut alone is enough reason to give this band a nod of approval, while the crisp ensemble playing in such songs as Out of Control and Escape should make clear that Hoobastank does not stink. They are in short a quartet of faceless role players who know their parts well and get the job done with minimum fanfare.

But the most commercially viable of generation next, millennium batch, is not of the Island label, rather the old reliable Atlantic courtesy of the resurgent glam act, The Darkness and their debut CD, Permission to Land. One may have already caught the hit single on the radio, I Believe in a Thing Called Love, which has all the elements of a reinvented glam rock: vocals that switch to falsetto and back at the drop of hook or lick, thick windmill chords and snaking lead guitar lines that would make Mott the Hoople proud, and a combustible rhythm section. But what makes The Darkness more than a nostalgia or retro band is their overall freshness in approach, and so what comes out of the speakers is as if we are hearing Foreigner or the New York Dolls or Iggy Stardust and Spiders from Mars for the first time. Even the follow-up single Friday Night should assure us that rock, glam or otherwise, as we know it is in good hands. They were guests in a recent show of Jay Leno, decked in all the finery of vintage rock stars, but not in the least did the music sound dated, and Leno’s jaw it seemed dropped a few inches more. A quantum leap over Einstein’s relativity theory The Darkness is: this is tomorrow is yesterday once more.