High Vis

There's a genre of short form video which runs variations of the following: we need white guys to get back to playing some form of rock music. The message has a double edge. One, the world sort of misses rock music, which has been mostly dead as a broadly popular metagenre for 20 years. Two, maybe it might help white guys stop being so isolated and weird.

I'm largely agnostic on point one. I have a take it on a case by case basis with rock music, and my least favorite school is 00s-early 10s indie rock, what my brother calls "high millennial culture" and I call "poop". I'm less agnostic on point two. While there are plenty of examples of men in bands behaving badly, there are also moments and discrete scenes where they behave very well. Besides, it's more achievable than whatever Scott Galloway is talking about (probably 1965 marriage) and things are pretty bad; let the lads have some punk rock as a treat to see what happens.

All of which is a framing for my new favorite band (until next month), High Vis. I'd run across them some time ago, I liked it, filed them away in my memory banks, and did other things. Then they toured with Turnstile and they blew up, their songs get millions of listens, and my meticulously trained algorithms started pushing more of their songs to me. Rock is back!

They're a bit hard to pin down and that's precisely why I like them. Turnstile pulls from early-00s emo most directly, at least on their albums. I don't like that stuff, even if Turnstile look to be awesome live. By contrast, High Vis weaves a tremendous amount of stuff I do like in unexpected ways to make something which feels fresh.

Mostly what they pull from is interstitial music. They sound like some hybrid of Stone Roses, Lookout Records punk, Gorilla Biscuits, and sometimes UK house. I'm far from the only one who's (belatedly) noticed this: an article at Loud and Quiet calls High Vis "a frankly out-there melding of Judge style Youth Crew, Sisters of Mercy-like goth and ’90s Britpop" and possessing an "outlook that balances the positive vibes of ’90s hardcore with a more kitchen-sink sense of social realism."

They're too young to remember all that but don't seem to blindly ape earlier sounds. They seem to find it all interesting and sometimes resemble a really good sample act with guitars.

"Mind's a Lie" starts with looped female vocals and Madchester-style drums before a slinky bassline and Johnny Marr-esque guitars kick in.

"Walking Wires" half pulls from the riff on Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Spellbound" then turns into a Dischord Records track.

Sometimes they just lean into the Madchester thing...

and then sometimes (often) they just make a punk song, but of this particular type that makes me think of a little snippet of punk which peaked between about 1988-1993: Face to Face, Pegboy, Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits. Not the stuff from before, not the stuff after.

All of it really does feel like more than the sum of its parts. And, like a lot of those punk bands, they put forth a pos masc, slightly bewildered by the attention vibe which is a welcome change from so much rock music from this century. It comes across most in their live shows, with singer Graham Sayle constantly expressing his thanks for everyone coming out, while the "everyone" is absolutely losing their minds. Check this show from 2022:

Anyway, I like High Vis