There is a tendency to equate Millenial's nostalgia for the '80s and Zoomer's embrace of '90s aesthetics as essentially equivalent, as part of a continuum of 20-year cycles of fashion and signifiers that superficially indicate a desire to return to an unmolested state of naive bliss. I don't think that's necessarily true, though. The adoption by Millenials of all things '80s kitsch, especially its darker aspects like John Carpenter films, grainy VHS reels, thrash metal, and disturbingly dark anime, always betrayed a certain yearning for the wealth and opulence of the era that produced these cultural ephemera- even in its most alienated expressions. The assumption of '90s aesthetics feels very different in contrast- as it should! While the '90s were similarly a period of prosperity for many, there was also a prevailing sense that "THIS" was as good as it was going to get, and shit was going to start sliding downhill, soon and fast, if it hadn't hit the skids already. It's this bleakness that I sense in contemporary group's like Buddy Junior (whose name I would not be surprised to learn that they came by in a similar manner to Dinosaur Jr.). Buddy Junior's second full album Rust has a certain fondness for precious jangle chords and slow dreamy melodies that rend and gesture in the direction of spinning charmers like Catherine Wheel, but what is most arresting about the album's arrangments and aural attributes is the pervasive sense of corrosion which it conveys via 31 flavors of despondent distortion and the fateful manner in which it trust falls into them. Opening with the weighty wall of noise and claustrophobic collapse of the title track, it braves through execrate waves of Robert Smith-kissed desolation on "Possession," before cascading through the telescoping misery pump "Holy," and finally nose-diving into the penultimate, deathly ripple of "2 Cents," Rust is like a psychically deployed oxidation technique that threatens to eat through your very soul- a cluster of reverberating dispatches from the cold, knife's edge of eternity, cutting through the pretense of one's personal history as anything other than a flat-circle, rotating uneasily on its edge and speeding towards the slot of a sewer drain.
Find more soft, pale dread from Cherub Dream Records.
