All The World’s A Genre

Grunge rides again with Enumclaw at The Rockwell on Sunday, 26 March 2023.

Indie rockers Nitefire and locals No Nations open in support.

Time is a flat circle. What does it mean to be a grunge act in 2023?

Since the technology of recorded music made it possible to revisit sounds, the notion of genres as a one-way street cascading through history became bunk.

We still speak and act as if genres were a reliable method to mark the passage of time. Everything about the way we interact and embed ourselves with music (and art more generally) tells us otherwise.

Go into a record store, flip through the crates, tell us what year it is.

Go into Spotify, scroll through the songs, tell us what year it is.

Genres are masks, and artists are at a masquerade ball. Something on the order of the party scene from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Genre is a clue to recognizing the mystery, but not a key to solving it.

Don’t take it too seriously.

Take it very seriously.

No Nations

Boston’s No Nations were the only local hosts on a very West Coast bill. Guitarist Erik Wormwood has been gigging solo around town, but he brought the full band on Sunday night.

The five-piece played loud music with a very “post” flavor. Post punk? Not cheeky enough. Post rock? Not spacey enough. Post hardcore? Maybe…

The band set up on the low dais. Is the dais a new add-on for live shows at The Rockwell? Not quite a stage, but a satisfactory gesture toward the ritual urge for a raised architectural feature in live performances. There’s a theology buried in that ritual urge, if you want to suss it out.

The five members of No Nations barely fit on the platform with all their equipment. In fact, the keyboard did not fit. But the platform was low enough to allow the keyboardist to wedge his instrument against the side of the stage and still find it comfortably within arm’s reach.

The only drawback was that he sang his keyboard-led songs to the curtain at stage right instead of to the audience. But the sound is all mic’d and amplified, so facing the audience is pure formality.

Nitefire

Los Angeles’ Nitefire might have stolen the show. You sometimes hear stories about bands that go on tour and, by the end of the run, the opener’s become the headliner.

That’s not going to happen here because their sound is apples & oranges with Enumclaw’s sound. Anyone who bought the Enumclaw ticket wants an Enumclaw-type of music. But if the two bands operated within more similar genres…

It was all about energy for the LA foursome. The band delivered a spirited sendup of aughts-era club rock. Shades of The Strokes, shot through with California sunshine and Hollywood glitz.

There’s precisely one song streaming on Bandcamp: “Ride Or Die,” a kind of swanked-out Ariel Pink jammer. The track leans way heavier on the synths than their more traditional rock rig in the live performance. If you weren’t looking for it, you might have missed the sampler tucked beneath a rag next to the drummer. While two guitars and a bass paraded up front, the drummer behind added some bloops and bleeps in his spare moments between snare hits.

Enumclaw

Tacoma, Washington’s Enumclaw has been on a Forever Tour for probably as long as they can remember. Strike while the iron is hot.

The four-piece has been getting great reviews for a mashup of grunge and shoegaze, which seems like an obvious and easy musical gambit in 2023 until you look around and can’t find anyone doing it better. If it was easy and obvious, you’d see more of it.

For all the 90s nostalgia in contemporary pop culture, you still don’t find many musicians doing interesting things with the sound signifiers associated with grunge.

With Enumclaw, you hear a band that’s starting to figure out how to play with the genres in new ways. Check out “Cowboy Bebop” from their 2022 LP Save The Baby.