The AmericAn jAm bAnd scene
THERE was a time where the punkest thing you could do in indie rock was profess your love for the polar opposite: the jammy, hippie aesthetics of the Grateful Dead and their endless descendents. Over the past decade, any vestigial resistance has softened, starting with the rehabilitation of the Dead’s woodsy Americana phase, courtesy of The National and friends.
But 2018 saw the emergence of several acts tapping into a more cosmic choogle, dabbling in collective improvisation at the outer reaches of rock instrumentation, while often departing from different planets of origin. Here, labels such as Beyond Beyond Is Beyond, Trouble In Mind and Paradise Of Bachelors have carved out a niche where the old arbitrary divisions between psych (cool) and psychedelic (corny) no longer exist.
One surprising cohort of bands now sporting unironic Stealie skulls like to draw from the group’s “primal era” – the hard-charging lysergic proto-punk of the late ’60s. So it’s less paradoxical than it seems to watch tie-dye fractals emerge from California’s garage-rock scene, where Ty Segall’s covers collection Fudge Sandwich slotted “St Stephen” alongside tracks from Neil Young and Funkadelic and Thee Oh Sees continued their prolific evolution into extended, double-drumkit rave-outs on Smote Reverser.
Elsewhere, long-time travellers on the freak-folk fringe such as Matt Valentine (MV & EE) and James Jackson Toth (Wooden Wand) organised overtly Dead-indebted projects in, respectively, Wet Tuna and One Eleven Heavy. Chicago’s Mind Over Mirrors and Cave approached drippy improv from a krautrock/electronic angle, redacting guitar solos in favour of texture and the fluid boundary between groove and drone. Meanwhile, the jam gospel crossed distant borders to Japan with deep psych from Kikagaku Moyo and Yuzo Iwata, and generational lines with Garcia Peoples, whose members were barely alive when their titular figure died.
There are many reasons for this revival – you could go political (if the news feels like the chaotic late ’60s, why not the music?), pharmaceutical (the rolling legalisation and mainstreaming of marijuana), or economic (live improv chops as profitable countermeasure to the penny-fractions of streaming). But regardless of the path, these acts converge to interrogate the same thesis put forward by the Dead over five decades ago: that there’s still unexplored territory in rock music to discover, if only you jam it hard enough. ROB MITCHUM