Grunge+ : How Drenge Made an Old Scene New Again
By the 2000’s, grunge as a popular genre had ground to a halt. Cobain was gone, STP had broken up (temporarily), and Pearl Jam released Binaural (eugh *shiver). By the 2010’s it, as well as many of its descendants (e.g., post-grunge (again, eugh *shiver)), had basically been relegated to the musical liminal space: too old for mega-stardom, too young for classic rock radio. That is, until a young pair of brothers from Derbyshire got caught up in the garage rock revival, and wanted to go way heavier.
Drenge
Drenge
Grunge / Garage Rock | 2013
By 2010, rock music, particularly the “alternative” brand, had taken a significant dive in popularity. Indie was in full swing with the likes of Arcade Fire winning the Best Album Grammy for The Suburbs, Beach House had just exploded with the release of their seminal Teen Dream, and The National put out their one good album. And Hip Hop was seeing a boon in hyper-artistry with pre-very-serious-problems Kanye having just released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
It was in this environment that Eoin and Rory Loveless found themselves: in love with all the guitars and drums and no one to play them with. Even the garage rock scene that had EXPLODED in the the 2000’s was waning fast: The White Stripes were done, The Strokes were…broken up? Who knows with them. Even Franz Ferdinand (both of them) were all but forgotten.
And so, our intrepid brothers… started the band as a joke. That’s right, they got drunk in a pub and went on stage and played as loud and fast as they could, recalling through their alcohol-soaked haze the glory days of power chords played through sludgy amps and a wall of distortion. Eoin’s voice is at times growling, and at others soaring, brilliantly emulating Casablancas’ best vocal acrobatics, while his guitar is shredding and deafening. And Rory’s drums are the best in the genre since Grohl put down the sticks, pounding and entrancing at the same time.
Yes, this incredibly timid, incredibly British pair was creating the Seattle sound as well as any native, with an impeccable name to boot. By 2013, they’d made enough of a splash doing the local circuit that an on-the-outs MP felt the need to call them out in his (probably forced) resignation letter. And so they got a chance to make the best, hardest, coolest, grungiest grunge record since the 1990’s.
People in Love Make Me Feel Yuck
A drumstick count-off begins the album, and the Eoin’s guitars crash in. There’s no doubt what kind of album we’re about to get. Rory’s drums are playfully dancing around the melody, while maintaining their constant bombast, a cymbal is never missing. The lyrics are some of Eoin’s cleverest in all of Drenge’s catalog, delivered in a scattered echo. In the first verse we see him compare the gruesome and the adorable as he likens himself to a puppy: “I found a bird on the floor that was covered in blood / … / Sometimes I like to roll around on the ground / So desperate for your attention, won’t you look at me now?” Later he’s positively philosophical: “We have no redeeming features / Just a desperate streak / To get along with the strong / And be obsessed by the weak.”
Dogmeat
Rory Loveless, in one of Drenge’s shockingly rare interviews, described their debut as “selfish,” with Eoin concurring. The indulgence of that selfishness can easily be seen on “Dogmeat,” with lyrics that are…not subtle about cannibalism, though they make for a great metaphor for being misunderstood (the hooks always begin with “everybody thinks…”). The music here also is Drenge at their most selfish, completely falling into the grunge aesthetic: thick distortion sounds chunky and sludgy on the guitars, while the drums are nearly effect-free, as if recorded in a hall closet. The contrast helps to amplify the fear of mischaracterization, while imparting the listener with a reminder of Drenge’s nearly budget-less recording. Very DIY.
I Want to Break You in Half
Here’s where the punk inflection and the blues influeneces of garage rock (particularly White Stripes) comes through in a massive way. Eoin’s guitar burns out a hyper-fast double-time country blues riff while Rory’s drums meet them with a mix of metal and post-punk timing. The lyrics are the angriest of the album, delivered at a full throat-shredding yell as Eoin cajoles and insults the (fictional) man taking advantage of his (also fictional) sister with lines like, “if you have a soul I’d like to meet it,” and, “can I have a minute of your time? I’d love to waste it,” before screaming “I wanna break you in half!” One does begin to wonder what the real animosity is here, as he later states “she says you thrill her.” I suppose we can’t choose who our loved ones love anymore than we can predict who we’ll love.
All that aside, this is song is mosh pit central.
Bloodsports
If there was ever an epitome of “chugging guitar”, the opening/verse line of this guitar is exactly that, like a runaway train. “Bloodsports” was the centerpiece of this debut’s pre-release marketing, the big single, and does it ever deserve it. The lyrics are brilliant, comparing love lost to that of combat sports: “Got a lover, but she gets another / Got a race horse, and we go to war.” For Drenge, not only is all fair in love and war, they’re the same thing. In a brilliant turn, after the story is over, the song completely changes (a trick we haven’t seen the end of yet) to a Zeppelin-esque jam. How can you jam in a two-minute song? They found a way.
Backwaters
“Backwaters” is one of several times that the influence of shoegaze—particularly of the more mainstream variety, like early Smashing Pumpkins—will turn from a trickle to a bursting dam. Eoin’s guitars are so drenched in reverb and distortion it’s hard to make out one strum from the next, our only clues coming when a bit of latent feedback creeps in. The blues chords combine with the effects to create a neo-psychedelic sound in the verses, which are…disturbing at best. The first describes our narrator watching a dying lamb in fairly graphic detail before ending with “I’ve never seen such beauty so maligned.” In the second, the narrator is assaulted and (perhaps) murdered for getting off at the wrong bus stop, due to his inability to pay to go any further, “in the murky backwaters I lay my body down.”
The stanza immediately following that has some VERY obvious American imagery: “Fifty stars above my head, and / Thirteen scars across my chest / Blue and red blood fuck up my veins.” I have tried in vain to find some definitive explanation here, but even ten years later, it alludes me. Maybe it’s just my unconscious American bias, or maybe it’s a commentary on American…violence? Greed? Greed as violence? A simple historical allusion to the Revolution? Please, if you majored in poetry, contact me immediately.
Gun Crazy
Another song to showcase the album’s “selfishness,” “Gun Crazy” also sees Drenge putting on their best Pearl Jam costumes, as major guitar riffs lead to descending, heavy, minor chords. The drums are almost reminiscent of a Keith Moon break, usually just keeping time, but with that extra spice at the end of a line that just the kick in the pants we need.
Clearly a break up has gone horribly wrong within the lyrics, with the narrator lamenting “everybody gives you what you want / but I broke all my dreams just do it alone.” After decrying in the first chorus that, essentially, his ex is out to kill him, his second verse says it all: “I’m a cunt ‘cause I do what I want / And I do what I want ‘cause I can.” The dangerous, heavily distorted breakdown that precedes it is as much about storytelling suspense as it is a showcase for the duo’s musicianship.
Face Like a Skull
Like many a grunge band before them, here Drenge throwback to a much older genre, particularly that of surf rock (a throwback to a throwback, in their case). The song starts pleasantly enough, but we are quickly thrown into the wash of a terrifying gyre made of slashing guitars and drums played at full caveman intensity. This is the stuff hard alternative rock has been made with since the designation came about.
The lyrics are just something else, so please, just, allow me to take you on this wild journey.
“Everything I do seems like I'm trying to be rude / And everything I say is always taken the wrong way.” Okay so he’s misunderstood and, given the tone of the music, pretty upset about it. “And I don't really care about the things you like / But I pretend I do because you love me when I lie.” So he’s misunderstood, but also kind of underhanded, so now we’re in the mind of a villain? “The only faces that I pull / Are the faces of a skull / Your piggy fat and cartilage / Hide the skeletal damage.” Is this “love interest” dead? Umm… “When you cracked your head you couldn't laugh for the tears / And when we got back home you washed the blood off with your beer / And if you cannot take another night I'm his arms / Then I'll nick all the batteries from his fire alarms.” Maybe not, seems like he’s rescuing a love interest from a bad relationship, though perhaps he’s doing it for the wrong reasons. “Your sunken eyes and rotting flesh / Tell me that you couldn't care less.” Oh, eww! This guy is definitely in love with a dead person. Wait, whose fire alarms were those? A mausoleum’s?
“Face Like a Skull” is the hard rocking, ass-kicking, headbanging, wind up rager that builds entire careers. It’s loud, it’s brash, it hella exciting. The lyrics are disgusting but somehow you feel like singing along. This song is the absolute shit. Play it every day.
I Don’t Want to Make Love to You
Another time-honored rock tradition: riffing off a Willie Dixon song. Here, Drenge deliciously invert the classic “I Just Want to Make Love to You” to really make it obvious that we are NOT interested in this woman. At the end of the third verse, Eoin is literally screaming that he really, very seriously, does not want to make love to you. Afterwards, the song turns to a slow groove complimented by more Pumpkins-esque guitar chugs while Eoin sings the foreboding line, “I found a gun and I told no one,” and even more disturbingly follows that with, “and if this keeps on going, can we get a drink around here?” But his warnings fall on ears made deaf by the infectious rhythms and blasting guitars.
Those guitars bleed out into a dissonant choir of feedback, fading into…
Nothing
Garage Rock blues is back on the menu for this ode to enjoying S&M. The topics of the album are quite the cornucopia, but they did say it was selfish, and oh what very naughty boys they are. “Drag me ‘round the yard until I'm brittle / Clip my ear then slap me ‘round a little / 'Til your bored, or something / But please don't stop 'til I'm reduced to nothing,” Eoin sings in what is by far the mildest verse of this Fifty Shades of Ferdinand. The lyrics become more and more depraved until our…subject is left at the bottom of the ocean to fulfill his need of self-degradation.
This song also includes a by-now Drenge classic musical turn. After the bridge, the guitar flits and spurts in various blues riffs before devolving into a full-blown fuzz war while Rory’s drumming flys off the handle, as loud and aggressive as he possibly can. It’s really a wonder to take in, a marvel of modern rock music.
Bye Bye Bao Bao
The shortest song on the album (a mere 1:10), is also the duo’s most experimental. “Bye Bye Bao Bao” is more of a soundscape than a song. The guitars are so fuzzed, reverbed, and distorted they produce an almost static-like sound. At their shoegaze-iest, Drenge create a rather beautiful little ditty about ending a friendship: “I want to be alone / Before I get old / I wanted you to know.”
But the real brilliance of the song is its hidden use as a cooldown. So much of Drenge has been ramping up and up and up, always getting louder, faster, angrier, heavier, more distorted and effect-driven. Here, the effects are so high you can barely recognize it as music, but its uncompromising overdrive can only be countered by a long, slow, single stanza. The end is not like the beginning, but the end begins now. The feedback, echoes, and distortion bleed into…
Let’s Pretend
Despite being the penultimate song, “Let’s Pretend” is the draw. At eight minutes, it’s nearly three times the length of the next longest song. It cuts down on much of the noise, leaving a truly melodic experience behind. Structurally, the song is a classic rock-style dirge (think about The Doors or Zeppelin’s slower, sadder stuff) about a love interest that seems to only be interested in sex. “When I come into your room / And you always start so soon / I want to be your friend,” Eoin laments, before agreeing that, for his own peace of mind, “baby, let’s pretend.” The last iteration of that line is screamed at the top of his lungs, desperate to be heard, to be understood, crying out for true connection.
What follows is something of a truly rare quality. The tempo, gradually, but insistently picks up. The guitars begin to abandon their requiem and begin again with a chugging march. Faster, faster, the guitars are getting louder, bleeding through into distortion again, the drums are adding more toms and fills. Faster, faster, cymbals are ridden and guitar riffs begin to take form. Faster, faster, this is Rory’s song now, his drumming becomes erratic, frenetic, panicked, like he must, MUST play this feature. Guitars are whirring to a din and cymbals are crashing to a point where they must be falling over. This, this is the stuff rock legends are made of.
Fuckabout
Much like this song title, remember, this band was started as a joke. “This song is a fuckabout,” Eoin sings over an un-altered acoustic guitar, “not one to write home about.” A challenge to the listener, is this song, is this album, even worth listening to? He continues to undercut its importance while using clever lines: “I live in a paradise / It’s not home, but I guess it’s alright.” The chorus sees him at full throat, full of regret about a dying relationship (“When you are down in the dumps / And you're kicking at the walls / 'Cause you don't know what you've said), while the drone of the fuzzed out electric guitar kicks back in, and Rory’s drums rill to life.
The final lines recall the opening song: “I don’t give a fuck about people in love / They don’t piss me off, they just make me give up.” This is the rock singer’s version of “oh, don’t listen to me, I just say stuff sometimes,” or, more aptly, the modern version of Macbeth’s “tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Drenge’s take on grunge, mixed with bits of 90’s shoegaze and 2000’s garage, is more than an excellent listen, it’s one of the very best. Its themes are blurry, and its story is, wow, just all over the place, but it’s always well delivered, and the duo’s musicality and natural ability to truly rock is beyond blatantly obvious.
Drenge the album, much like Drenge the band, quickly became a staple in my music catalog, and this release in particular has become one of my utmost favorites. If you wanna rock out, and I know you do, this is the album that will get that job done. Barring “Let’s Pretend,” the tracks are confined to 2-to-3-minute assaults that never pause for a breath or a drink of water. It’s 100% raw, unfiltered rock music that will mainline into your bloodstream, and the only fix is to play it again.
