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 ’90s alt-rock blandness, what could be more conventional, played-out, and old hat by 2008 than the standard, White Stripesy palette of “raw,” “dirty,” “warm”? Not that those received associations have ever gone away entirely: They’ve just wound their way through to the beyond-exhaustion point of what I call “Studio Dirty,” and young bands modeled on this obsolete value system still trundle forth to play the lower rungs of festival line-ups.
Having said all that, when I finally clapped ears on Suburban Tours in spring 2010, it didn’t 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 at Sunset Sound Recorders.
But I could see what Joe Knight was getting at with “dull, numb, and vacant”—there’s 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’d 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.
As the record coalesced around a mood, Knight started to title the tracks after subdivisions where he’d grown up: neighborhoods with names like “Deerfield Village,” “Bear Creek,” “Woodland Hills,” and “Glencairn” that gesture towards the wilderness they’ve replaced. He titled “Golden Triangles” after a mall near Denton he used to visit as a kid when staying with his grandparents. “Out Past Curfew” references the regulations that kids love to flout in American towns, even when there’s not that much to do out there after dark.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
