Permanent Nostalgia

In recent years, the legacy act has come to occupy an interesting space within music. For the sake of my argument, I’m defining a legacy act as an artist or group that has existed for at least 20 years. Most of the people that I will discuss in this dispatch are eligible for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. None of them will see the inside of that building—more than likely due to the lack of interest in such recognition from the selection committee, the act itself, or both—but artists with this level of longevity are what I’m considering as legacy acts.

Legacy acts can be classified into three general categories. The first category is the cash grab legacy act. The best current example of this category is Oasis. Following years of pubic animosity and a moderately successful solo project for Noel (he’s got some good tracks buried on those High Flying Birds albums), the Gallagher brothers put their beef to the side to grab some of that sweet, sweet nostalgia money by going on a tour. This is not a cynical reading on my part; others have noticed this as well. For example, Alexis Petridis of The Guardian says the following on this point during his review of their first concert of the tour at Principality Stadium in Cardiff: “No-one—including, to their immense credit, Liam and Noel Gallagher—seems interested in pretending this tour is anything other than a hugely lucrative cash-grab, and, clearly, you can only grab the maximum possible amount of cash if the tour doesn’t descend into the kind of bedlam to which Oasis tours were once prone.”

While I could be critical of the cynicism at play here, I respect the honesty of the effort. I would honestly be more upset if they said that this was a sincere reunion, a clear lie given the continuing apathy between the Gallagher brothers. People love Oasis and still play the hits all of the time. If you are the Gallagher brothers and see how much influence your music has, I think you could put away the hatred for a little while and play the hits for an audience that will pay top dollar to hear them. Are they all decades old? Sure. Does that matter? To the fans, absolutely not.

The second category of legacy act is the continuing legacy act. In this category, you can slot in artists like Bruce Springsteen and Nas. Both men have been releasing work consistently since the beginning of their respective careers. Both men have written all-time classics. Both men have also written absolute duds. (The less said about “Oochie Wally” or Bruce’s cringey political songs, the better.) While the quality across their careers can vary, they never stopped either recording or touring. To be clear, these two men are on the better side of this equation, as their late-career music still has some merit even it doesn’t hit the transcendent heights of earlier work. (To be fair, it would be hard for either man to write music as perfect as their classics.)

On the other side are classic rock acts like Night Ranger, who are still out on the road and recording new music at regular intervals. Do you know what any of these new songs sound like? Did you know that Night Ranger was still a continuing recording concern? Can you name a Night Ranger song that is not either “Sister Christian” or “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me”? I can, but that’s only because I looked it up, and in full honesty, I forgot the second one was a Night Ranger song. To be clear, I don’t want to malign them as musicians. Touring is hard, and they clearly care about what they are doing. I can assume that there is an audience that appreciates what they are doing; otherwise, they would have given up the ghost and retired. That said, when they play a concert, a solid 75% of the audience there is waiting for them to play the two songs that they know from them.

The third category is the one that interests me the most and I will spend the rest of this dispatch discussing: the returning legacy act. In recent years, whether it be because of nostalgia, boredom, or missing the camaraderie of their bandmates, among other reasons, several bands have gotten back together and started making music again after having very extensive layoffs or breaking up.

One of the first times that I noticed this was with Mission of Burma, the seminal Boston post-punk act. They existed from 1979 to 1983. They broke up because guitarist Clint Miller’s tinnitus was getting worse and worse. Although they were only around for four years, it was OK because they released Vs., an absolute masterclass of post-punk tension and noise.

After 21 years away, Mission of Burma reappeared to the surprise of everyone with ONoffON, an album of new songs that showed the band had not lost a step. If anything, they had gained some new skills in the interval. With Bob Weston stepping in as engineer after Martin Swope decided not to return (there wasn’t any animosity; he just didn’t feel like it), the fury of the band was ramped up and focused. A song like “The Setup” from the aforementioned album really highlights how the attack of the earlier music is really sharpened into a fine point. The guitar is more aggressive, the rhythm section is more dialed in, and the overall sound is leaner.

This album and the subsequent three albums show that the band still had plenty to say and new ways to destroy the hearing of people young and old. More importantly, they represented a rupture in the legacy act landscape. They were a band that came back around to make music that is, at minimum, equal to the music that they had made previously. It is truly wild to see something like this, and that’s the part that brings us to current times.

Within the last decade, multiple bands that many thought were long gone have come back together to release new music that fits well with their prior music or surpasses some of it. One such band is Slowdive, one of the bands that define the genre of shoegaze. After releasing 1995’s Pygmalion, the band broke up and pursued other projects. They came back together in 2014 to play a few shows, and then decided to get in the studio and record. They have released two albums in the subsequent times: Slowdive (2017) and everything is alive (2023). While Slowdive is a very good album, it plays a little too close to what they were doing before. There is some growth, but it does feel safe. This problem completely disappears with everything is alive.

everything is alive is an album that progresses Slowdive’s sound in profound ways. The gliding drift of their earlier sound is refined and accentuated with electronic washes, as guitars provide texture and depth. The vocals of Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell blend together as they always have, but they show their age in a beautiful way. Their maturity provides a roundness to the music and gives it extra emotional heft. It was an album that blew me away when I first heard it, and I return to it often. It’s an album that shows that Slowdive still had more to say as a band.

Another band that took their hiatus to advance their project is The Dream Syndicate. The Steve Wynn-led band is best known for its debut album, 1982’s The Days of Wine and Roses, an absolute masterwork from the Los Angeles underground. They released three more albums before they broke up in 1989. In 2012, The Dream Syndicate started playing shows again. I watched some recordings of these shows, and it was clear that Steve Wynn and Co. still had it in spades. Five years later, in 2017, The Dream Syndicate released How Did I Find Myself Here?, an album that showed the band at a different point in time but still containing all of the guitar excellence that defined the 1980s iteration of the band.

As the band continued to release albums, any images that one could have of the band were completely erased. Over the course of the four albums they have released since reforming, Wynn and Co. have pushed The Dream Syndicate in more outwardly psychedelic and prog directions while still maintaining a commitment to writing creative, engaging rock music. A good example of this is “The Regulator,” the first track from their 2020 album The Universe Inside. Starting with a drum machine, guitars, and a sitar, the song settles into a groove as the drummer takes over from the drum machine. That base groove carries the listener through various psychedelic moods over the course of its 20-minute run time. The idea of hearing something so strange and spacy from The Dream Syndicate, a band that loved turning their amps up and playing hard and fast, is puzzling at first, but the mental confusion evaporates when you hear something that is so entrancing.

Adding to the lineage of Mission of Burma and Slowdive, The Dream Syndicate came back to the music scene to provide a new approach to their music, adding greater depth and dynamism to their overall discographies and their musical legacies.

Another side to this third group of legacy acts are bands who took extended breaks and come back like nothing has changed at all. There are a few examples to this end. The two that have gotten the most press recently—and that I will focus on here—are Pulp and The Cure. This is with due reason. Both bands have massive, adoring fan bases, and their influence on their respective scenes (Brit-pop for Pulp and goth rock for The Cure) cannot be overstated.

To start with Pulp, before they released this year’s More, their last album was We Love Life in 2001. There was a brief reappearance from 2011 to 2012, but nothing occurred on either before or after that timespan. Although it has been 24 years since We Love Life, More is a natural progression for the band. If you were just listening to the albums in sequence without knowing what I had just told you, you would be hard pressed to know that there had been such a long layoff between albums. It plays on all of the strengths of the 1990s albums that their fans know and love (the dance music elements, the drama, the sharp lyrics, Jarvis Cocker going all out) while throwing in some lessons learned through decades of living. The result is an album that slots beautifully into the legacy of Pulp. It’s a little more serious, for sure, but it still very much retains its sense of fun.

I would assume that we are all familiar with The Cure, even if our points of reference are different. Yours could be “Friday I’m In Love,” whereas mine is “A Forest.” In any case, the influence and spread of The Cure cannot be understated. While everyone had more or less assumed that the band had stopped recording music and slotted into the space of being a legacy act touring on the strength of their previous material, Robert Smith and Co. surprised us all and released Songs of a Lost World in 2024.

The album is The Cure through and through. It recalls the slow grandeur of Disintegration, but no light is allowed in unlike on that album. Smith tells stories of loss, mortality and sadness with his melancholic voice, and the result is beautiful if not goth as all hell. It hits deep as each track slowly unfurls itself deep inside of you. While it is maybe an album you don’t want to listen to on a bright summer day, it is an album that slots beautifully into the discography of The Cure, adding another chapter to the band’s already storied history.

While there have been other bands who have come back after an extended hiatus and make new music that fits well into their archive (The Jesus Lizard, Stereolab, and McLusky all fit into this category), the legacy act does not always succeed in this effort. A prime example of this is Clipse.

Known best for songs like “Mr. Me Too” and “Grindin’,” the duo of Pusha T and (No) Malice made a couple of absolute street classics in Lord Willin' and Hell Hath No Mercy. With The Neptunes providing gritty, futuristic beats, Push and Malice spin dense, lyrical tales of cooking and slinging cocaine. Their abilities as a rapping duo are unparalleled, and the Neptunes knew how to provide them clear lanes to ensure their words were heard. While Pusha T has a successful solo career, there were rumblings here and there that a Clipse reunion was in the cards. The washed hip-hop fan in me was thrilled to hear about this. However, the washed hip-hop fan in me has to see the reality in front of me: Let God Sort Em Out is not hot.

To be clear, there are parts of the album—primarily the tracks about cocaine—that are very good, a reminder of what made them so special. As a result, the album is not a complete wash. However, the whole project feels rickety. Push and Malice work with Pharrell again, and the magic of those earlier productions is gone. The beats don’t hit, and some of the lyrics are extremely weak. Let me hit you with this particular gem from Malice on “Ace Trumpets”:

This Clipse album should serve as a cautionary tale to remind you to relish when legacy acts drop projects that add to their legacies rather than diminish them. It’s a feat that is much easier said than done. Dropping the bad legacy album is like walking into a glass sliding door at a party: it makes everyone think just a little less of you. Not much, but enough for folks to look at you a little sideways.

With that, I thank you for joining me again here at the Rinse. Take care of yourselves, and I will be back with Spins and another, hopefully shorter dive next week.