These days indie-rockers fly their country flag high, flaunting their appreciation for traditional roots music. Back in the '90s, though, country wasn't nearly as fashionable, at least outside of alt-country circles (and even now it's easy to forget how revolutionary alt-country was back then; the thought of city kids revisiting Gram Parsons was a novelty of the highest order).
Country still informed indie-rock in the '90s, but seldom explicitly. Dinosaur Jr. buried their country undertones behind a deafening squall of electric guitars, emerging as a missing link between Neil Young and grunge, while Pavement hid their twang in plain sight, passing it off as irony. But perhaps no subset of indie-rock drew more from country than slowcore. Bands like Bedhead, Codeine, Idaho and Red House Painters built anguished suites from the down-and-out spirit of country, even though they rarely overtly borrowed the aesthetics of country. Though these acts preferred slow-burning rhythms and loud/soft swells to honky-tonk tempos and pedal steel, in tone and songwriting they were every bit as indebted to Hank Williams as their alt-country contemporaries.
Rex's outstanding 1996 album C was the height of country/slowcore fusion, a 67-minute opus of rickety, crashing guitars tied together by singer Curtis Harvey's achy croon and lifted by breath-taking string arrangements. Working in a genre better known for small statements, Rex created something epic, an album that could be the score to a grand road-trip film.
Slowcore fell out of vogue after the turn of the centurythat is, if it ever really was in vogueand Rex quietly disbanded in 1999, without being passed down to the next generation the way Bedhead and Red House Painters were (it also doesn't help that the band's name is invisible to search engines). It's doubtful, then, that Rex is an overt influence on many contemporary bands, but the fusion on C of slow-burning, rustic songs with sweeping, post-rock dynamics and orchestral fireworks was well ahead of its time.
|
|
