The Curmudgeon: Loud Guitars vs. Smart Words

There’s always been a tension between loud guitars and smart words. The words want to be heard, and the guitars want to roar without restraint. Usually the guitarist wins, and the frustrated lyricist hopes the listener is reading along with the CD booklet or lyrics website. The lyricist hopes the lyrics can give the lead vocals an extra edge—and that that edge can cut through the amplifier noise even if the individual words don’t.

A lot of rock fans don’t care if the words mean anything; they just want the consonants and vowels to sound good in the mix. Bernie Taupin and Michael Stipe, for example, wrote words that sounded good without meaning much of anything. But a minority of rock fans do want the words to mean something. We want the adrenaline rush of the guitars and the catharsis of the words.

The Vancouver duo the Japandroids announced in October that their new, fourth studio album, Fate & Alcohol, would be their last project as a band. There would be no farewell tour, no final show. It’s a magnificent record, proof of how good they were and how much they’ll be missed. And it’s an example of the tension between guitars and words.

Singer-guitarist Brian King had that rare Bob Mould knack for making his waves of briskly strummed guitar chords sound melodic even as they came crashing down on the rocky shore of David Prowse’s hammering drums. As with Mould’s bands, Hüsker Dü and Sugar, this combination of yearning tunefulness and spitting, dissatisfied electronic overtones captured the yes/no response to the modern world so many of us have.

But it’s often hard to pick out the words from the commotion. And in this case it matters, because King, who writes most of the lyrics and sings most of the leads, has a gift for language. Maybe you have to resort to a lyric sheet to get it, but he has a way of evoking a time and a place, usually a working man’s bar where the snow is “sticking to the glass” of a small window in the glow of “a blue-and-red beer sign,” where from the “deepest, darkest corner of the place,” your ex gives you “a feral stare.” In every song, the narrator tries to choose his best escape from loneliness: getting stupid drunk or trying to turn around his bad-luck streak with romance, wondering if the former leads to the latter or the latter to the former. As the push of desire rubs against the wall of past experience, the friction erupts in fast, hard guitar.

The riffs evoke a general feeling, but the words nail it down: “Take this fucking phone from my hand before I break down and call the medicine man.” That song, “D&T,” named after drinking and thinking, gathers its contagious momentum from an anthemic hook that seems as hard to resist as the impulse for self-destruction. King doesn’t mince words with himself or anyone else. As he sings in another catchy onslaught, “Chicago”: “You can sit there, deny it all night, baby, but this just-friends act ain’t fooling me. I’m so sorry, baby, but we call it like we see it, in Chicago.”

Prowse wrote the lyrics and sings them on one song, “A Gaslight Anthem,” an obvious allusion to another loud-guitar band, also formed in the first decade of the new century and also featuring a lead singer named Brian. The New Jersey band is led by Brian Fallon, who carves out more sonic room from his bandmates for his lyrics to be heard. On the band’s latest album, last year’s History Books, those stories of growing old on rock’n’roll deserve attention, even if they’re not as dramatic as the group’s 2010-2012 masterpieces American Slang and Handwritten.

In the ‘00s, the Japandroids and the Black Keys were both guitar-drum duos that took the inspired example of the White Stripes in new directions. Jack White, the singer-guitarist of the latter band, has a new solo album, No Name, that finds him wailing in a Robert Plant high tenor over choppy Jimmy Page blues-rock riffs, his lead vocal often backed by just three instruments: drums, bass and his own guitar, much like Led Zeppelin. Nine of the 13 tracks on No Name are power-trio numbers, usually anchored by Patrick Keeler on drums. The album emphasizes sound more than sense. The melodies are minimalist, and White’s voice is mixed at the same level as the bass and drums, the voice supporting the guitar rather than the other way around. White’s writing and singing evoke an agitated state of arousal on the edge of ecstasy or hysteria. What is he ecstatic or hysterical about?

The half-obscured words don’t offer much help, even when one resorts to the lyric sheet. Often rhymes are just shoved together whether they cohere or not. “My love for him was honest,” White shouts on “What’s the Rumpus.” “It’s not out of context. Our love is not a contest…, but our love will grow. It’s floor to ceiling, unappealing.” On a handful of songs, White does connect the dots between the words, suggesting the allure and dangers of religion without God on “Bless Yourself” or his need for a lover in his jaded life on “Terminal Archenemy Endling.” Perhaps he recognizes this, for he clears space on the latter song for the words to be heard by a potential mate—and by us eavesdroppers too. And some of us appreciate that.

The Irish quintet Fontaines D.C. have released four studio albums since 2019, and all four have made the Top 10 in Ireland, Scotland and England; the last two have done the same in France, Germany and the Netherlands. None have cracked the Top 90 in the U.S. The band’s early work had the brittle, loud guitars and detached vocals of the Velvet Underground; their later records have added more keys, strings and voices to achieve the Gothic artfulness of Nick Cave and PJ Harvey. But through it all there has been a fascinating tension between Grian Chatten’s words and the band’s three guitars (including his own).

The new album is Romance, which opens with the title track arguing that “Romance is a place” where the singer and his lover keep returning to, despite their misgivings. The words are sung with weary resignation, but the guitars create the grim architecture of the “place” with a prickly, mechanical riff and occasional thunderous crashes. But the band is careful to save those industrial wallops for spaces where there are no vocals.

This dystopian approach to modern love continues throughout the album. Chatten’s vocals alternate between snarky skepticism of romantic connection and needy pleas for the same. On “Starburster,” for example, he vomits out a hip-hop-like torrent of staccato rhymes, describing romance as “a moral tyranny keeping me from me” over shoving and pushing guitars. Then, suddenly, the soundscape clears, and he earnestly begs a lover to “take to my sky, never waiting, only wonder.” There’s a pause and the grinding guitars return.

Fontaines D.C. use the inherent tension between loud guitars and smart words to reinforce the conflict in the songs, which pit sentiment against skepticism, desire against disdain. And they do it in a way that the words can be heard and the guitars never feel restrained. The instruments have a serrated aggression, but they rise and fall in volume, drop in and out, to let the words provide a more precise meaning for the menacing sound.

And that’s the lesson that rock bands rarely learn in the studio—and almost never on stage. Some will argue that lyrics don’t really matter in rock ‘n’ roll as long as the vocals sound good. That strikes me as foolish. That’s like saying it doesn’t matter what notes the bassist plays as long as he or she has a good tone. Why use words at all if they don’t matter? Lyrics are an invaluable weapon in popular songs and pushing them into the background is an act of unilateral disarmament.

[Author’s Note: This is the final Curmudgeon Column for Paste. Thanks to the magazine for hosting it these past 11 years. Look for the column on a new site next spring.]