Out Hud - S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D.
(Kranky)
Tortoise killed indie rock. After "DJed," perfecting the three minute punk song was no longer seen as an intelligent man's reason for being. Instead, fusing together a wide variety of left field genres became the thinking musician's pursuit.
A good five years after the aftermath, perhaps it's time to look back and ask, "What was all that for?" Several German and Canadian groups have attempted to continue in Tortoise's footsteps in their own special way, focusing on some small pieces of the puzzle Tortoise laid out on the table and creating worthwhile music. However, no group has really tried to expand upon that framework, especially in America where few have done anything more than try to stylize the Tortoise sound, effectively making Tortoise's impact on rock music destructive more than constructive.
Which all makes Out Hud a special band, something uniquely American as instead of taking Tortoise's music and looking at it as just that (songs to be recreated), they look at what Tortoise was trying to do and make sense of that in their own whitebred suburban upbringing. Thus, the styles Out Hud uses are not what's in vogue, nor what is considered a lofty pursuit. Instead, it's just what the band is used to and what the band is into.
And, of course, the four letter word that I've put off stating thus far is "funk." Funk is a dirty word that can lead to a lot of misconceptions, and it's easy to misrepresent Out Hud using that word. Thinking of James Brown and the J.B.'s, Bootsy Collins, or Parliament Funkadelic will help little in placing the music of Out Hud, as Out Hud is neither as urban nor as unfettered as those groups. Perhaps if we're looking back that far, The Meters' brand of earthy, instrumental, highly-rhythmic New Orleans funk is the one closest to Out Hud's bastardization.
In fact, one could say that a fractured sense of the disco-era soul of Off the Wall affects a song like "Dad, There's a Little Phrase Called Too Much Information" more than any electronic funk outfit. All of the 80s are heard in these seven and a half minutes. The bass line pulses on every down beat, creating the perfect music for doing the robot. The ping-Pong-like sound of the drum machine takes over in the middle of the song, creating early Trans Am-like video game music. Underpinning the whole song are boogie keyboard riffs that are continuously morphed and cut up, getting overdriven and obliterated by bursts of static, sounding like the last gasps of disco music.
While it's easy to reference soul, disco, and funk while talking about Out Hud's music, the key style is always post-rock, and there's no bigger (or longer) example on the album than "The L Train is a Swell Train and I Don't Want to Hear You Indies Complain." This twelve and a half minute song plays off a tightly wound groove, with little of the earthiness that affects much of the rest of the album. This groove shows Out Hud also is aware of the German branch of post-rock like Tied+Tickled Trio and Couch, as it is similar cool, fluid, and infectious. Somehow the song ends up with an acoustic guitar and cello part that directly references Tortoise's "DJed."
Tortoise didn't create the best songs or the best music—the first three albums seem much more about ideas and free-thinking more than the creation of music, and we certainly didn't need as many recreaters of that sound as we ended up getting. What we did need was for other people to take the ideas of fusion and free-thinking and apply it to their own musical mindframe, and that's what Out Hud does, creating their own, new sound instead of just playing off what was already there. While I won't disparage the three-minute punk song, it's certain that Out Hud wouldn't have existed without the killing of indie rock. So perhaps indie rock needed a good killing after all.
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