A little while ago I realized why I like Iceage so much. It isn’t their music per se, although I totally love both their albums. And it isn’t their exotic teenage Scandinavian mystique, although after watching the “Ecstasy” music Video I can understand why some people are so taken with it. No, the reason I like Iceage so much is that they feel, to me, somehow, like the potential beginning of a new era for indie.

(Note: Please don’t read too much into the word “era” here. In the 21st century, musical “eras” don’t last more than three to five years tops, and there are typically at least half a dozen going at once.)

Iceage are poised to become bona fide indie darlings: their sophomore album, You’re Nothing, was released on 19 February on the venerable Matador label to wide critical acclaim, including an 8.6 from Pitchfork (and, as avid Pitchfork-reader will surely agree, the difference between an 8.5 and an 8.6 is more crucial than any other one-decimal threshold from 0.0 to 10.0); they are about to embark on a massive tour of the Europe and the US; and they’ve even generated some mild controversy by flirting with neofascist iconography or something—which, if you think that will do anything except just amplify their buzz, then you, my friend, know nothing about buzz.

Okay, you might say, sure, but that happens all the time. There are like a bajillion bands a year that emerge from the underground and become nationally or internationally visible, even—whatever the fuck this even means nowadays—almost mainstream. And yeah, you’d be right. But here’s the thing: of all the new indie bands that have achieved that level of darlinghood over the past oh let’s say five or six years, NONE of them sound like Iceage. The point is: if my intuition is correct, and Iceage really does end up being much more than just a flash in the pan, ends up achieving success on the level of let’s say a Best Coast or a Washed Out, they will be the most unapologetically hard-rocking band to do so in a very very long time.

There are a few exceptions, sure—the first one that comes to mind is the balls-out post-hardcore of Toronto’s Fucked Up. But isn’t it interesting that both Fucked Up and their most comparable contemporary, Les Savy Fav, are fronted by chubby balding men with bushy beards? And that the latter frontman, Tim Harrington, even had show on Pitchfork.tv called “Beardo”? I bring that up just because, no matter how great your music is—and both those bands made great music—if your frontman is a balding chubster with a beard, that’s what the Pitchfork-skimming-at-breakfast masses will know you as. As much as we love to pretend it isn’t so, bands aren’t just selling music—they are selling a total aesthetic, a Gesamkunstwerk—and if an integral part of your image is that your frontman is a balding-bearded-chubster, then the mass of casual hipsters, the demographic that grants indie darlinghood or denies it, will always view you ultimately as kind of a novelty act no matter how good your music is. The rest of us, the real music-appreciators, might know better—but there aren’t very many of us and ultimately, I’m sorry to say, we don’t really matter.

No, unless I am forgetting something major, I’m pretty sure that, in order to locate bona fide indie darlings that rocked as hard as Iceage rock, we have to go back a full ten years, to the blossoming of post-hardcore in the early 2000s, to records like Blood Brothers’ Burn, Piano Island, Burn, Lightning Bolt’s Wonderful Rainbow, Trail of Dead’s Source Tags & Codes (incidentally, my favorite album of all time), and the Locust’s Plague Soundscapes (incidentally, still the most fucking batshit insane album I have ever heard in my entire life). And ten years ago, the world was a very different place: the mighty Arcade Fire had only a single self-released EP to their name; dance-punk was still little more than a twinkle in James Murphy’s eye; Garden State was only in pre-production; hipsters wore studded belts and black pants that looked like leggings and Fidel-Castro-type hats (fuck-the-system hats, I like to call them) and smoked Djarum Blacks and read Adbusters and carried around Dickies messenger bags covered with buttons. To sum up, indie had not become mainstream yet, and the bands mentioned above were successful in what was still very much a niche market.

Which is all to say that the burgeoning indie darlinghood of Iceage represents a mildly unprecedented event in the recent history of indie: the first band in years to figure out, or stumble upon, a way to rock the fuck out and still be cool. It’s feels fitting that You’re Nothing dropped on the very same day as Clash The Truth, the lukewarmly-received and just-not-very-good sophomore album of Beach Fossils: if Iceage represents, if my intuition is correct, the dawning of a new era for indie, then Beach Fossils are the veritable poster-children of the era that this potential new one stands to supplant—i.e. the era in which rock ‘n’ roll was on vacation.

I mean “on vacation” in two senses of the phrase, one metaphorical and the other quasi-literal.

Let me start with the quasi-literal meaning: the music of this Beach-Fossils-typified era was by and large in some way or another vacation-themed. If the bands didn’t literally have the word “beach” in their name, or literally sing songs about the beach, or both, their music just sounded kind of beachy, kind of vacationy: the tempos were down; the vocals were easygoing and languorous; everything was soaked in a certain reverb that, when properly deployed, was the aural equivalent of the sun shimmering off the ocean into your eyes. It was music that sounded like it was on vacation, like the records should come packaged with flip-flops and knockoff Wayfarers from the drugstore. Note that not for a second am I saying there is necessarily anything wrong with this at all. It isn’t really my exact jam per se, but I can groove on it just fine.

Now the metaphorical meaning: I meant “on vacation” as in “absent,” as in “not there.” These vacation-themed bands—Beach Fossils, Beach House, Best Coast, Real Estate—just don’t rock. Again, I am NOT saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. All four of those bands have made music I like-if-not-love. I just listened to Best Coast’s “Crazy For You” twice in a row, and I’m going to listen to it a third time as soon as I get to a point in Beach House’s Bloom that doesn’t knock me flat on my ass. Don’t misunderstand me: this music I might seem to be casting dispersions on, it’s good music. These bands are good bands. It’s just that they don’t rock. Rocking is just not what they do; it’s not the point. And I know I’ve said this twice already, but I’m gonna say it once more: THAT’S OKAY.

Now say what you will about Iceage—say they’re overhyped; say they’re fascists; say they’re talentless, snot-nosed little pricks who will be forgotten in six months; whatever—one fact about them is completely and utterly above question, and that is that they rock. If you disagree with that statement, there are three possible explanations: ONE, your standards of what constitutes “rocking” are so high that even Iceage do not qualify, in which case, I’m interested, please tell me more; TWO, you haven’t actually listened to Iceage, in which case, just listen to them and you’ll see what I mean (specifically, start by listening to “It Might Hit First,” off You’re Nothing, and then listen to You’re Nothing all the way through from the beginning; the entire process should take just under half an hour—go ahead, I’ll wait); THREE, you have listened to Iceage and are saying they don’t rock just because you’re that sort of obnoxious person who has to disagree with everyone constantly, in which case this conversation is over.

Okay, you say, they’re indie darlings and they rock, what of it? There are plenty of darling bands out there that will rock your fucking face off at the drop of a hat. Hell, you say, even BLACK METAL has quietly (as it were) become a highly respected genre of music over the past few years, with bands like Gojira and Liturgy and whoever getting critical adulation that rivals that of those vacation-themed bands I just mentioned a second ago. So yeah, you say, I’m just going to decide that you’re basically full of shit and stop reading your article and look at Facebook now.

To which I say, hold on one second! Yeah, I say, you’re right, plenty of rock-your-fucking-face-off bands have been critically-acclaimed all along. But critical acclaim is not what I’m talking about. What I mean is—and this goes back to what I was saying before about the significance of Fucked Up and Les Savy Fav both having balding bearded chubster frontmen—what I mean is that somehow, for whatever reason, Iceage are cool. That is a tremendously loaded word, I know, and one that resists definition more tenaciously than any this side of “pornography,” and I am not even going to begin trying to unravel the mystery of what makes Iceage cool, but somehow I just know that they are. Iceage is a band that rocks your fucking face off and is cool.

Rock ‘n’ roll has been going in and out of style in 5-10-year cycles since the very beginning. The first cycle lasted five years, from Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” in 1954 to the infamous “Day The Music Died,” the plane crash in 1959 that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, a moment immortalized by Don McLean’s almost-as-infamous song “American Pie.” Rock ‘n’ roll then took a five-year vacation, which the cool kids spent listening to John Coltrane and reading Frank O’Hara and smoking grass and singing folk songs and sitting in the front row at Antonioni flicks, and the bro-y kids spent listening to Perry Como and Herb Alpert and chasing skirts, until the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan show in 1964 and suddenly rock ‘n’ roll was cool again.

This seems like it can’t be true, but I’m thinking about it, and I really honestly think that the last time rock ‘n’ roll decidedly, bona-fide-ly, honest-to-God became cool again was when Nirvana broke out in 1991, and that was a long fucking time ago. There was that whole “return-to-rock” thing that happened around 2000—you know, the Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the White Stripes, etc.—and those were some good bands, and it could have been really great if it hadn’t been for Rolling Fucking Stone. You know how sometimes you’re at a really cool, really fun party, and everyone’s just kind of chilling and having a great time, and then all of a sudden some big fat asshole in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants stands up right in the middle of the room and is like “WHOOO! THIS PARTY IS SO FUCKING AWESOME BRO! WE’RE ALL HAVING SUCH A GOOD TIME LIKE PARTYING AND STUFF BRO!” and then the room goes quiet and everyone sort of looks around at each other and feels embarrassed and suddenly the party isn’t so fun anymore? Yeah, well, imagine that party is whatever those four bands were onto and Rolling Stone is that fat asshole, and you will get a sense of why rock ‘n’ roll failed to become cool again in the transmillennial years.

(Anyway, Rolling Stone (true to form) was on the totally wrong side of history. If they actually wanted to herald the future of music, there are two albums they should have been praising to high heaven: Daft Punk’s Discovery and Radiohead’s Kid A. The story of rock ‘n’ roll in the 2000s was the story of rock ‘n’ roll incorporating the idioms of electronic music, and that story begins with those two albums.)

So all I’m saying, I guess, is this: ONE, we are ten years overdue for rock ‘n’ roll becoming cool again; and TWO, if my theory is correct (and only time will tell whether or not it is) then the burgeoning indie darlinghood of Iceage is one of the early signs that the cycle is beginning again. I, for one, am happy about this prospect, because I happen to really really like music that rocks my face off. Some people don’t, and that’s fine. All I’m really saying, I guess, is that if my prediction comes true, just remember that you heard it here first.

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