The music world is confusing. You have a lot of people who are content with simply defining bands as one genre, like 'rock' or 'jazz'. It doesn't fully detail what they sound like, but a person has a general perception of how to mentally approach a band. But on the polar opposite end of the spectrum, are the people who simply confuse you too much by trying to be too scholarly in describing what a band sounds like. Post-wave. post-punk, post-rock, what the hell is that? I mean, I know the terms because I've been around enough to know them, but to anyone else, it's really off-putting. Thankfully, most people just tell you to check out a band instead of trying to be pretentious about it. The combinations of these experiences, really, is how I found out about Weekends new album, New Humans.
All you need to know, really, is that these guys are very grunge-like in their approach. See? That's not too hard to imagine. It's of course modern, so it doesn't try to follow the tropes of 90's grunge too much, except for the fuzzy guitars. No one needs to go further than that, because you have to leave some room for imagination to take over in a persons brain before they listen to them.
"A Defining Love", "Basement Love" and "Trust" were the three tracks I took the most away from on the album, mainly because of how crisp and polished they felt above the others. Grunge doesn't normally correlate with the words 'crisp' or 'polished', but, over the other songs on the album, these felt whole. That's not to say the other tracks don't feel like songs, because, obviously they do, but there's an unmistakable care that seems to have been put into these three.
Some tracks, like "Conspicuous Waste", do sound as if you've found an underground grunge band from Seattle in the 90's. They're very sluggish and trudging, and yearn for you to watch old-school re-runs of Beavis and Butt-head on a bootleg VHS (That's the best 90's slacker comparison I could come up with). They don't stay nostalgic long, as "Soaked" and "June Echo" sound very modern and more like rock tunes, instead of straight up grunge tunes.
I listened to this album three times just to get everything right, because it took a little while for me to warm up to it. There are other bands like them out there, but they're one of the only acts I know who have made grunge come back in a positive way. Maybe they won't call themselves that, and maybe other people will take twenty minutes intricately describing their sound, but, to me, this is what they come across like. But the only part you need to take away is how good this album is. - Shane
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