THE GOTOBEDS
Photo credit: Masha Vereshchenko
Pittsburgh, PA
Cutting corners and putting it plainly: Masterclass (and the Gotobeds as a whole) sounds like what people meant when they talked about “indie rock” in the 20th century. You like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement‘s earlier, noisier stuff—the college radio all-stars? You’d probably like the Gotobeds. (Yeah, the name comes from Wire’s drummer’s assumed name, and if you understand how Chairs Missing basically spawned every prominent indie rock subgenre of the ‘80s and ‘90s, you already have a good idea of what the Gotobeds are working at here.) Riffs and hooks drenched in noise, melodies that fit perfectly but sound a little busted somehow, an exuberance and love of sound that’s free-spirited but rooted in adult experience, intentionally crafted chaos: the Gotobeds really are back out here once again showing us how it’s done. And about as concisely as possible—they blast through 10 songs in 31 minutes, which is tied with “two songs in 45 minutes” as the ideal length for an album.
As always, they do it with humor and a fair amount of bite. These aren’t 21st century kids channeling their parents’ record collection: the Gotobeds are grizzled pros who remember first-hand that this whole “indie rock” thing grew out of punk, shedding its stifling genre orthodoxy but holding on to a decent chunk of its animating ethos. It’s not the tepid singer-songwriter broth or untalented careerism that the tag “indie” came to represent in the ‘00s—it’s in the older tradition of the form, the truer tradition, the one worth celebrating.