Weekend – Red (Slumberland)

Great bands like Weekend almost make you want to entrust the youth of today entirely to the present. For every band that’s repackaging something old to people too young to know it ever existed, there’s another band that’s seriously attending to the needs of the young (and the needs they didn’t know they had), making the past not irrelevant but momentarily optional. Example: If this proposed “youth of today” haven’t discovered Hüsker Dü, then they’ve got No Age, much more than just a simulation of that band’s tender, melodic noise, filling not the same need but a parallel one. They’ll sense punk’s real existence, even its history, without yet knowing its specific early triumphs. They might lack certain joys and rages but they’ll be generally happy and interested, not lost to the void where there is no sound.

And if they haven’t heard The Jesus & Mary Chain, maybe they’ll have found Weekend. Last year’s debut Sports was a zenith, life-changing, epochal rock ‘n’ roll album, with heavy drums, heavier bass and shades of spectacularly decaying guitar, and with the misfortune of being released in 2010, when the use of such qualifiers was necessarily more hopeful than realistic. So faced with the tragedy that this great album ends up sadly not quite essential, not as much embedded in the listener’s life force as it ought to be, let’s bring back the “youth of today” and deliver them unto it. I don’t know if there’s any kid out there who’s skipped his or her rock history only to discover Weekend, but I hope there is.

The new Red EP could be that kid’s first lesson in the way good bands change even as they remain the same. Red is balanced precariously between the scary, hazy, jolting menace of Sports and a new slickness of clean, dynamic drumming and twinkling and/or airy guitar. But it’s not an awkward fit. If anything the music is even more textured and strange as a result. “Hazel” is last year’s “Coma Summer” minus the coma’s attendant fog; there’s a lot of stray noise, but all of it tailored enough to play as an audition for posthumous John Hughes soundtrack. The refrain—hazel like mine—even plays into that teenage feeling where an unremarkable trait is suddenly exceptional when it’s found to be shared with a secretly cherished other. Taylor Valentino on drums pours a lot of his energy into radio-ready precision, but not all: some spills out as sonic debris. Just enough, in fact.

Closing track “Golfers” offers the opposite mixture, opening in Sports mode, unbearably heavy even as it seems to arrive as mere echo, and then introducing yawning guitar and a high bass line (did Wild Beasts lend a hand?) against the thundering one, like a commentary on past form or a bird’s eye view of their earlier work. The whole array comes off as very arch and art and genuinely tense, like something The Comsat Angels might have attempted on Sleep No More. Earlier, “The One You Want” leaves out the droning and in its rushing energy recalls any number of 80s bands that just failed to make it big, The Sound in particular.

And here I am undoing my already shaky premise and talking about the past. That’s okay: I suspect most of Weekend’s fans have arrived at them via extensive previous listening. They, too, will like this, but won’t be able to hear it entirely on its own terms, not that that’s even possible in a fluid world like ours.