It’s good to have the Gotobeds back. Guitars, feedback, noise: glad to hear ‘em. The band’s two-album stint on Sub Pop wrapped up over six years ago, with 2019’s Debt Begins at 30, and, uh, the world has seen some shit since then. They sat out the whole Biden administration—honestly, kind of a smart move. But America is done with its latest half-hearted attempt to maybe just barely try to hide how dumb and evil it can be, which makes a new Gotobeds record even more welcome than usual. The good stuff is needed now more than ever, and Masterclass is about as good as it can get.
Cutting corners and putting it plainly: Masterclass (and the Gotobeds as a whole) sounds like what people meant when they talked about “indie rock” in the 20th century. You like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement‘s earlier, noisier stuff—the college radio all-stars? You’d probably like the Gotobeds. (Yeah, the name comes from Wire’s drummer’s assumed name, and if you understand how Chairs Missing basically spawned every prominent indie rock subgenre of the ‘80s and ‘90s, you already have a good idea of what the Gotobeds are working at here.) Riffs and hooks drenched in noise, melodies that fit perfectly but sound a little busted somehow, an exuberance and love of sound that’s free-spirited but rooted in adult experience, intentionally crafted chaos: the Gotobeds really are back out here once again showing us how it’s done. And about as concisely as possible—they blast through 10 songs in 31 minutes, which is tied with “two songs in 45 minutes” as the ideal length for an album.
As always, they do it with humor and a fair amount of bite. These aren’t 21st century kids channeling their parents’ record collection: the Gotobeds are grizzled pros who remember first-hand that this whole “indie rock” thing grew out of punk, shedding its stifling genre orthodoxy but holding on to a decent chunk of its animating ethos. It’s not the tepid singer-songwriter broth or untalented careerism that the tag “indie” came to represent in the ‘00s—it’s in the older tradition of the form, the truer tradition, the one worth celebrating. (Quick addendum about “careerism”: there’s nothing wrong with making a living from your art or music, of course, and ideally it’d be enormously easier to do so; at least know what you’re doing and have some self-respect about it, though.)
That tradition wasn’t forgotten by accident. It took effort. Why is it beyond embarrassing when a band complains about their reviews, especially when the reviews are pretty positive, but it’s good and right and cool when the Gotobeds sing “these critics have no taste” in “Fante”? Because you know the Gotobeds are talking about a community and not just their own selves, about that older, deeper tradition and not just their own music. Because, to anybody with good taste, it’s a pretty incontrovertible fact: the people who have somehow become the most prominent critics on what can be called “indie rock”—the ones treated like experts, who have staff jobs and get book deals and pop up in documentaries—are the same ones whose unadventurous tastes have helped turn “indie” into a lifeless husk of a market segment almost completely disconnected from its original inspirations. The Gotobeds aren’t whining about a specific review, but are criticizing the culture of criticism that has helped reorient a once-vital scene around some of the most uninspired and unchallenging music imaginable. Masterclass, and the Gotobeds’ whole career, amounts to propaganda by the deed; instead of blowing stuff up, though, they’re just reminding us all what a good fucking rock record actually sounds like.
It all builds up to the best thing on here, and one of the hits of the year: “Mirror Writing,” a sludge stomper just a few BPMs up from a dirge, like The Fall in sinister plod-and-lurch mode (not a hint of their Manc rockabilly in this rhythm), but with a sharp melody slicing through it all with a bright, vivid, woozy tone—a hint of chorus, definitely some overdrive, a guitar solo as a blast of light straight to the brain. Truly the good stuff.
Masterclass is proof that you can openly revere the classics without getting trapped in nostalgia. It’s proof that there’s still life not just in those specific classics but in their techniques, and that new classics of this particular bent are still possible—that there’s something primordial and everlasting in this kind of music that didn’t fall prey to some arbitrary expiration date 25 years ago. It can be as vital and vibrant today as it was in the ‘80s or ‘90s. Whether you’re 50 and still listening or 15 and just getting started, Masterclass is what it says it is.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
