UK Writer Longs For “Excitement” Offered By American Alt-Rock Scene

Earlier this week, Beth Ditto was lamenting to the Guardian that it was easier to be freaky over in the UK, and that the US music scene was too big to allow the celebration of differences. Well, UK writer Rob Morgan is challenging Ditto’s assertions on the musical front, at least, saying that it’s actually American bands that are more interesting right now. A snippet of his argument:

The Americans have a vibrant, original, alt.music scene that doesn’t exist in this country. There is a proper sustainable mainstream alternative over there in The Shins and Modest Mouse, Spoon, Death Cab For Cutie, Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley.

Bigger than merely cult bands, they amount to a coherent and credible scene with a following.

And those are just the college radio topsoil. Beneath them, there are tons of interesting US artists (Battles and Secret Machines, say, or the Elephant 6 collective) filling halls and making exciting and well-received music. Somehow, it all seems to be working out for them.

Contrast that with the playlist of our leading alternative rock station today: Athlete, Editors, Reverend & The Makers, Travis, Turin Brakes and The Twang.

Wait for Coldplay, Keane, Razorlight and Hard-Fi to cluster bomb us with their next releases and you’ve got a whole Music Scene of the Damned: no ambition, dying of boredom.

The important thing here isn’t that every British band I’ve listed there is duller than David Cameron’s (not bad) record collection, it’s the less tangible feeling that the Americans are outflanking the UK somehow on our own turf – difficult, intelligent, groundbreaking, literary “indie rock” records with a genuine emotional core – uncompromising, existing on their own terms. We stupidly thought we owned that land.

Leaving aside my own aesthetic issues with the bands he cites as “exciting” (I don’t know about you, but that last Death Cab record was one of my No. 1 audio narcotics of the past few years), isn’t Morgan’s problem a simple matter of scale? Because if he was going to compare the “leading alternative rock stations” of our country and his, I have a feeling he’d have no argument (and, thus, nothing to write about). After all, even though I’m no fan of many of the bands Morgan cites as being part of the UK music malaise, I’d much rather listen to their alt-rock station’s offerings than the Linkin Park/Finger Eleven/Papa Roach/Three Days Grace stew that’s currently being put out by the country’s reporting modern rock stations. (I can understand Linkin Park, but come on–Finger Eleven? In 2007?) If you want to talk about “no ambition”–aside from maybe wanting to bum out people who are still trying to channel their adolescent rage, many years after they passed through that demographic–the music put out by the bands on this country’s alt-rock radio stations wins, no contest. Or maybe whoever’s programming those stations should actually get the prize, since they seem to be unwilling to move on from music that’s pretty much rotted after its long-ago day in the sun.

Why American Bands Are Best [MSN UK, via I Love Music]