An unhappy late-1990s memory of mine consists of Giovanni Ribisi's pants down, full junk out in the non-remake remake, SubUrbia: no Vandals or TSOL, just swinging balls to period-piece Decline-of-Western-Indie-Rock mood-setting. That movie and soundtrack were stillbirths-- angst-doses for kids who'd already been getting them on screen and stereo for six or seven years-- and even my young self sensed something slacker was dying. New Radiant Storm King's The Steady Hand arrives then as a super-oddity: call it spirit of spiritless '97, or SubUrbia soundtrack redux. Their "Accountant of the Year" is Girls Against Boys' "Bulletproof Cupid"; "Fighting off the Pricks" is Superchunk's "Does Your Hometown Care?"; "Yardsale Legacy" gets to be Sonic Youth's "Sunday" of course; even "From a Roof" could be the Butthole Surfers' "Human Cannonball".
That that kind of major-labelled indie rock was already choking itself to death circa then-- same for the last vestiges of anything called "college rock." Regardless, New Radiant Storm King's website still reads as elegy for Nirvana magic-markered flyers and Homestead Records. We learn about gigs with Sebadoh and GBV, sleeping over at the Unwound house, and they even offer up a depressing late vestige of the Year-Punk-Broke contract boom: either a very large or very small $45,000 from Grass records, a former Dutch East India subsidiary. It gets worse. Try a '97 tour with "it's good to be the king"-era Creed, then shelved contracts, unreturned phone calls, and inevitable indie oblivion.
I did college radio in Massachusetts, which meant I was knee-deep in NRSK detritus. They had splits with Silver Jews, Polvo, GBV; everyone who followed '90s rock ended up with at least a compilation song; like most people I played the flip of those records, or other songs off the comps, but they were old familiars. Who knew they still breathed?
But also, why? Their buzz is now commonly spun as "near miss," but that's just B-list fate. My friend Joshua had a high school (circa 1993) fling with Rival Time's "Phonecall", a college love-letter/acid-in-the-woods slacker paean to a girl with "brand new glasses." Stack that against The Steady Hand's 2006 pseudo-social commentary "Accountant of the Year": "I think I'll go in early today/ I think I'll catch an earlier train/ I'm going to make my quota today." I'll take the girl, thanks guys, and not just because my grandfather was an accountant.
Ditto on the minefield truisms of "Fighting off the Pricks": emo-by-numbers "every atom of my being beckons me to keep on staying here," complete with falsetto chorus, and sweeping dual guitars (one vaguely jangling lead, the other the epic rhythm). College crushes are cute but at least a couple of these dudes ought to married by now, no?
We should root for the underdog though, and unreconstructed '93 indie is definitely that. Their rallying cry, for a guy looking pretty hard for one, wasn't too hard to find on The Steady Hand. "Anthymn", a vaguely Foo Fighters rip, has the fist-pump chorus and the low-dynamic bridge to charm you back, or make you still believe in shiny happy half-rock. Until, that is, you realize what you're shouting along to: "Reckonings of who you should have been/ Are by comparison/ Sure of who you were 10 years ago/ Where does a decade go?"
