July 19, 2008

Moderately good Argentine rock [NerdKids]




Hey, expectations need to be set low here from the nation that gave us Los Ratones Paranoicos. Although I will say that 'Sigue Girando' can sometimes enter my head when I least expect it. Look at that totally gratuitious mp3 link! I will DEFINITELY be monitoring the stats on that one to see how many people it infects.



Down to the business of NerdKids. I know some of this audience lives in or around Silicon Valley, so let's take a quick step back and say: in a lot of places in the world, such as Argentina, people don't go around calling themselves 'nerds.' So major props to the band for naming themselves NerdKids, and for naming first track off of their album "Este es el tiempo de los chicos raros," or "This Is The Time of Strange Boys." (It's worth pointing out that there are 2 girls in the band but chicos refers to them all)



According to this press clipping, they say:

"We're strange boys. We have to do with what makes up the nerd part of society: comics, movies and books. We're neither heterosexual nor homosexual: we're sexual. We're in the future and we have to leave aside a whole bunch of primitive ideas.


This is a breath of fresh air in the almost universally stale world of Argentine rock: at last, an idea! So does the music live up to this rhetoric? Yeah! This rock is really good at sounding like it's from the 1990s. It's nothing ambitious, and I can totally tell that this band idolizes the Smashing Pumpkins, but I did too so that's not a problem. This is 'emotional' rock in the way that Dinosaur Jr. is... the singer's lyrics are pretty pathetic, although there's more hope here than with Dinosaur Jr. I don't know of any other frontman of an Argentine rock band who is willing to suffering without sounding fake.







NerdKids - Videos+Discos [Bubbleglam, 2006 <--start here]

NerdKids - Este es el tiempo de los chicos raros [Bubbleglam, 2006]


NerdKids - Estaciones [Bubbleglam, 2006 <-- 'epic' rocker]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey now, Argentina gave us Sui Generis

Dan said...

you'll have to enlighten me