I’m a giant sucker for heavy metal/shoegaze crossover. Whether it’s the post-metal of Isis or Pelican, or the black metal/shoegaze hybrid (I decline to call it “blackgaze” in deference to a gay friend who prefers African-American partners and who accordingly once made fun of me at great length for mentioning that I had been enjoying a lot of blackgaze) pioneered by Ulver and Alcest and made hip by Deafheaven, the unlikely synthesis of the brutal and the ethereal just hits me where I live.

Last week a band of that ilk released an excellent entry point to the subgenre—a doomgaze cover of an iconic Madchester song. Namely, “I Wanna Be Adored,” the lead-off track from Stone Roses’ 1989 eponymous debut LP, and one of the most stunning side-one-track-one songs in rock. The song was a strong declaration of intent, and was read as an answer to long time hometown fans who were disappointed that “their” band had signed a big-money deal with Silvertone, but the song had been recorded as early as 1985; its early provenance and the content of its minimal lyrics—“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me, I wanna be adored”—indicated that selling out was an impossibility as the band had sought pop stardom from the start. From Breaking Into Heaven: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of The Stone Roses:

The album, like their live performances, opened with “I Wanna Be Adored,” an ominous, throbbing baseline from Mani winding out of the darkness, lit up by golden notes dripping from Squire’s guitar. Towards the end of the song, the lyrics changed, gaining intensity: ”I wanna … I wanna … I gotta be adored.” Brown whispered the words for the most part—the approach that always served his voice best; his vocals were sexy and arrogant, insinuating their way into the listener’s consciousness. It was the Roses’ clearest statement of intent to date—nothing less than adoration would do for four men capable of creating something so special.

 
If that was the only Stone Roses song you’d ever heard, you could be forgiven for assuming they were a shoegazing band—it’s slow-burning, hypnotic bass groove and oceanically HUGE reverbed-out guitar sound fit well with that style’s signature tropes, and combining that with its lyrical conceit of swapping in Satanic possession for their desire for stardom, it’s a wonder that a shoegazing metal band hasn’t taken on a cover sooner. But last week, King Woman stepped up exquisitely.

If you’re not familiar, the band is a project of Kristina Esfandiari, a former member of Whirr (she ended her association with that band well before they infamously disgraced themselves) who also releases music under the nom de rock Miserable. King Woman’s Created in the Image of Suffering was singled out by Pitchfork as one of 2017’s best albums, and justly so—her music is a compelling aggregate of Mazzy Star atmospherics and the menacing drone of Earth, and lyrically, she mines fittingly dark territory—some of her work is a response to the trauma of growing up in a Christian doomsday cult. From an interview on the Sargent House blog:

I’ve had anxiety and depression since I was a little kid, but I also had a lot of trauma while growing up, so who knows how they’re all connected. But ever since I was in kindergarten I wouldn’t talk in school at all. My teachers would tell my mom, ‘Your child has the worst type of social anxiety we’ve ever seen.’ And I didn’t know this until I got older, she never told me. Never got any help for it, never took me to a doctor or anything. So I just suffered and didn’t understand that I was suffering because I was so little…Really timid, no real sense of self. I was raised in a very religious environment so I had no backbone, no identity. And that’s just such a bad combination with anxiety and depression.

When we started writing the first King Woman EP, was when it all came out. It took me a while to realize that there’s nothing wrong with my darkness. There’s nothing wrong (with the fact) that I have a sense of dark and light; it’s a perfect balance. And, like, we need both of them. And there’s nothing wrong about me writing about my experience, and there’s nothing wrong with me being honest about what happened to me. It’s helping other people and I am getting flooded with emails from people around the world, telling me their experiences, and I’m doing something right.

It was a shitshow after that first EP came out and I started doing interviews. I got awful threatening mail, I got Christians saying whack shit to me, like they want to pray for me and they hope I see Christ’s light, and my family was pissed at me for saying the things I said, but I was like ‘Fuck all of you, I have suffered my whole life and I am not going to shut up. This is my experience. This is my story, and I don’t give a fuck about what any you think, because I’ve cared long enough, and I’ve been controlled long enough, and I’ve had no voice for long enough, and there’s so much that I need to say.’

Hear it, after the jump…

 
Gen Xers—particularly those hailing from the UK, but some advanced Yanks, as well—may remember a fleetingly brief time just before the turn of the 1990s when the Stone Roses seemed to a great many otherwise sane people like the only important band whatsoever (Jane’s Addiction and Sonic Youth probably begged to differ). Even some of their Manchester contemporaries were on board with that assessment: still in my teens in 1989, I scored a face-to-face interview with Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays, who was tripping so many balls that no matter what question I asked him, most of his answers were variations on “FOOKIN’ STONE ROSES ARE THE FOOKIN’ BEST, I FOOKIN’ LOVE THEM.” But no band—NONE—can live up to messianic expectations from an overly exuberant press and fan base, and when legal battles with the label that released their debut album left them unable to release anything, their momentum was consumed and that was that. Their years-overdue sophomore LP was generally considered a disappointment despite its wishfully grandiose title, and plus their whole “baggy” trip was kind of irrelevant by then anyway, long since eclipsed by shoegaze, grunge, and Britpop. When their reunited band was announced as the headline act for 2013’s Coachella festival, under-30s flocked to Twitter to ask um, excuse me, who?

But despite that kind of embarrassing start and the poor reception to their upbeat but insipid 2016 comeback single “All for One” (the subsequent “Beautiful Thing” is a little better), their concert dates have been greeted with enthusiasm, and really, nothing changes the fact that their self-titled LP is one of the most singularly brilliant debuts in rock history. Clearly some of their devotees remain as fanatical as the ecstasy-addled ‘80s kids that made the band short-duration gods.

Which is the only possible explanation for how a fucking jar of air from their show at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium last weekend has been bid up to £65,900.00 (almost $97K USD).
 

We’ll give the seller this: the lemon on the lid? Nice touch.
 

A helpful demonstration of the air’s capture

Which utterly boggles the mind in itself, but when considered against the fact that there are other bottles of air from the same show on eBay, one for only £0.99, it becomes damn near impossible to parse just how this could have happened. And also I’m sorry but there’s just absolutely no way a shipping cost of £12.45 (more than $18 USD) is justified for just one little bottle. The way some of these eBay sellers gouge you, I swear to God…
 

 

 

Yep, I searched eBay for “stone roses jar of air.” What’s the dumbest thing YOU ever did at work?

If you’ve got money to burn and are drool-cup stupid, bidding on the various bottles ends within a range from three to six days.

More after the jump…

 
Consider this the perfect accompaniment to “Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation?” This excellent article, by writer Wallace Wylie and published on Everett True’s Collapse Board, centers around three bands (The Stone Roses, Primal Scream and Oasis) and the negative impact they had on the British music industry and general media in the 1990s. In contrast to Steven Hyden’s US-focused articles, Wylie sticks striclty to the UK and does a really great job of skewering that shower of shitty hype we had to endure called “Britpop.” This represents my feelings about the period pretty much exactly—yes, there was LOADS of great and interesting music being made at the time, but for the most part it was not being made by white men with guitars.

It should be obvious to almost everyone by now that Oasis really weren’t very good, and this is coming from somebody who bought into the hype early and even attended their monster concert at Knebworth. Definitely Maybe remains their best release, with the album coming across as rather varied (by Oasis standards) and tuneful. This was before Noel settled in to writing all his songs in the same Let It Be-derived tempo. It isn’t really necessary to go into detail as to why Oasis were substandard. This has been done elsewhere and will continue to be done for a good while yet. Their limited talents soon ran dry but not before they had kicked open the door to a million soundalikes who popped up every other week on the front cover of NME.

We were constantly being told by the press that we were living through a musical golden age to rival the Sixties (aaargh! why is always the fucking Sixites?! booo-ooring), and while I do think the 90s was a golden age of sorts, I am glad that hindsight is x-ray and cuts through all the bullshit. There were many, many groundbreaking things going on in the world, yet the British music press seemed content to just curl up into a little ball murmuring “Beatles, Stones, Beatles, Stones” ad nauseam. Remember, this is the era that saw the launch of backwards-obsessed magazines like Mojo and Uncut, and the calcification of rock culture into a rigid set of rules to be adhered to. It sucked. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Read what Wylie has to say…