Pitchfork

In recent years, I've come around to what is still rather secretly the most fertile time of musical evolution in the Pitchfork demographic's average lifetime, and given that I was between the ages of -2 and 4 when it was actually occurring, I don't feel too bad about being late to the party.

The time period I'm talking about is 1977-1983, quite conveniently what is covered on this here double-disc compilation. To use the relevant genre classification instead of carbon-dating, it's the post-punk/new-wave era that New Waves cohesively digests, and while those two musical descriptors have become watered down over the years from overuse, this collection is a welcome reminder that they once were potent movements which laid the groundwork for much of the music we put in our ears today.

Ay, there's the rub: One can't help but listen to a collection like this one without coming to a handful of shocking realizations about those flavors-of-the-moment I've done my part to hype-- turns out they're not making such an original statement after all. Which doesn't bother me so much-- derivativity is nothing to be ashamed of when done well-- except that I feel I've failed as a critic by not mentioning Jilted John's self-titled single as antecedent to Art Brut's everyday-occurrence anthems, or by only now realizing how much of Interpol's musical-mascara genetic material is derived from the Damned's "Grimly Fiendish". Oh well, never too late to start faking it.

The reason why the sound of 77-83 is still so vital is probably due to the sound's intermixing of punk rebellion with dance-floor awareness, a mixture that still hasn't fully seeped into the deepest layers of indie rock, even given the recent hullaballoo. Of course, not everything on New Waves is an ancestor of poor, neglected dance-punk...there's a spectrum from standard punk snare-thwak (i.e. the Ramones, Buzzcocks) to disco-club infiltrators (i.e. Sparks, Robert Palmer) between which each of these 45 artists plant their sound. It's a worthy reminder, however, of how the reactionary, one-dimensional punk movement rose-lens celebrated by Warped Tour types lasted about nine months total, before the punks stopped thumbing their pierced noses at disco and started assimilating it.

Then you can sit back and appreciate how the mixture was taken even farther by via the girl-group injections of Blondie ("Hanging on the Telephone"), the empty-room folk activism of Billy Bragg ("A New England"), Bow Wow Wow's herky-jerk rhythmicity ("Go Wild in the Country"), or Teardrop Explodes' hijacked soul-brass ("Reward"). Clicking off before post-punk segued into New Pop, New Waves

offers up a few scraps of foreshadowing in "Video Killed the Radio Star" and M's "Pop Muzik".

There's very little to complain about with this set. It's very clear that the collection is unabashedly Britcentric, and the inclusion of pub-rock like Splodgenessabounds "2 Pints of Lager & a Packet of Crisps Please" might seem unnecessary, but after years of Ameri-canon indoctrination, it's refreshing to hear the story from a different vantage. I could maybe also haggle about the songs picked for certain artists; for instance, while it's always nice to be reminded that Dexy's Midnight Runners had more than one song, there's never a reason not to give people every possible chance to hear "Come on Eileen".

But minor quibbles aside, New Waves is about as solid a primer for this era of musical history that can be acquired legally. Some of this territory was already covered by Rhino's No Thanks! box or the OOP 1-2-3-4: Punk and New Wave set, but this collection, packed as it is into two discs and with a strict one-song-per-artist rule, offers a much more concise argument for the time period's relevancy. So while a couple listens through New Waves may make you feel a bit like an idiot for having loudly trumpeted the fresh sound of Franz Ferdinand to your friends last year, it's not too late to dig the sound of the first time around.