INDIO, Calif. â€" American rock music might get a bad rap, but its cancer begins from within. Major labels have all but tabled creative ambition, meaning that even bona fide indie stars may have to content themselves with being mini-scene champions for life. Early on Saturday at Coachella, there was a suite of young American bands trying to find a path out of the darkness.
First came the incandescent hardcore band Trash Talk, from Sacramento, who played short, smart and brutish. The frontman, Lee Spielman, looked a bit under the weather, but he still pounded the microphone against his forehead, fired back at a heckler and crowd-surfed even with his right leg in a cast.
A little ways away, the Nashville band Mona was punching its way through a set of greaser rock with melancholy undertones. “Cool party!†one of the band members kept saying, and it was refreshing to think he didn’t quite mean it.
Neither of those bands, though, feel like part of a larger zeitgeist-to-come, even if a hardcore revival is imminent (it’s the new metal â€" start the countdown) or if Mona has lots in common with a king-size post-bar band like the Gaslight Anthem, which will play here on Sunday.
Just after Mona finished, Shovels & Rope began playing on the adjacent stage. If there is an American rock movement of the now, this acoustic twosome from Charleston, S.C., is close to the nerve center. A married-couple folk act, Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent, they scream Newport Folk Festival more than Coachella, but in a post-Mumford & Sons world, this qualifies as pop. Of all this afternoon’s young bands, they were the softest, but they might make the loudest crash.
