Le Rug

I'm completely fascinated by the cycles that music takes. Ask me five months ago if there are any good bands currently playing in the underground music scene that all the kids with their shaggy hair seem to like, and I would tell you maybe two or three names off the top of my head and subsequently go off on a diatribe about how much I dislike modern indie and how full of shit everything is. I would then put down the bottle of whiskey I was sipping in between every odd word or so, in a forceful enough manner to smash it to pieces, and apologize profusely for wasting 20 minutes of your time. My, how times change! I now find myself knee deep in bands that are either completely awesome or at the very least interesting, and as a result have been able to switch back to malt liquor to quell my nightly demons.

One of those bands in the "Completely awesome" category is New York's Le Rug, yet another instance of a band with a name I hate making wonderful music. The brains behind this band is some 19 year old kid named Ray, who was in some band called the Medics (who weren't as nearly good from what I've heard). According to the always-credible internet, Ray has quite a story; In a very short period of time, he was approached by label execs who gave him a shitty deal that included selling out his band, rejected this, got dumped by some girl, tried to kill himself, landed in a mental institution for a few days, broke up his band, then wrote a whole album in a week that he only recently released. Phew. But I mean, seriously, who hasn't had a week like that?

Getting down to how the music sounds, the song Gaxinthaw was the first thing I heard, and it very immediately and completely gripped me. It has such a big, catchy intro and then immediately thrusts you into the oncoming traffic that is the rest of the song. It has a serious lo-fi indie feel to it (you can tell he's obsessed with The Fall; he named a whole album after a Fall song) and a great vocal line. Le Rug's music bounces back between loud, top-of-the-lungs style rock (Gaxinthaw) and a dark, moody shadow of hooky pop music (The Loveless Fuzz). It has something of a dancey feel, and with two drummers, it has a very big rhythm section to get people moving. Guitars are fuzzy and keyboards are sharp, and everything gets cobbled together into a muddy mess which actually ends up sounding pretty dern super cool. I've only been able to hear the songs on the Myspace and a few I've tracked down on various blogs, but most of what I've heard makes me want so much more. And is there more.



Even someone who hates this band would have to give them credit for being prolific; they just came out with their third or fourth release this YEAR. Considering I've been trying to put a second album together with my band for the last, oh...two fucking years now, well, that just blows my mind. I haven't been totally in love with every single song I've heard by them, but none have been necessarily bad per se, just not my thing. And when you're putting out the volume of music they are, that's impressive.