Please Close Your Eyes

Jay Reatard “My Family” – Over the (long, boring) weekend, I saw a large chunk of Don Lett’s endlessly self-congratulatory documentary Punk: Attitude on the IFC channel. It’s about as awful as its name implies — it’s a nonstop nostalgia-fest that haphazardly and incoherently cuts around through the timeline, ignores all sorts of key artists while exalting the obvious and the overrated, and generally acts as though the genre’s history ended with Nirvana. Most egregiously, it only flirts with the concept of punk rock as a sort of traditional music — Henry Rollins talks a bit about how musically conservative punks can be, but the film is too hung up on the notion of punk as an inherently rebellious movement to deal with the reality of what it has become over the course of three decades. More often than not, contemporary punk bands (especially hardcore bands!) are extremely practical entities that churn out music with a limited, modular set of elements and a rather precise sense of purpose that boils down to “music for punk rock shows and punk rock people.”

In context, there’s nothing wrong with this sort of thing, or any sort of utilitarian music, and it only signals the creative death of the genre if you’re deaf to the many permutations of punk that continue to pop up, or are willing to write off a guy like Jay Reatard, who writes vibrant, urgent songs that fall firmly within the tradition without seeming stale or overly beholden to the past. In its way, his most recent album Blood Visions is not unlike the work of the Scissor Sisters, Belle & Sebastian, Phoenix, Marit Larsen and the New Pornographers — it’s about mastering the craft of an established form that has since fallen out of fashion, and finding ways of modernizing and/or personalizing its tropes. It wouldn’t be hard to convince someone that Reatard’s album was actually released by a bunch of dudes obsessed with UK punk in 1980, but there’s something about the album, and I honestly can’t isolate exactly what it might be, that seems inextricably rooted in the present tense. (Click here to buy it from Midheaven.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site, with rather excellent mp3s from Of Montreal, Field Music, and Busdriver. I’m very fond of the new Field Music album, and if anyone makes a better album than Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? in 2007…well, then that album is going to have to be pretty damn astonishing. I’ll certainly come back to both of those records on this site in the months to come.