CONSTANT VELOCITY

On Nirvana’s Unplugged album you can hear Kurt Cobain describe how he tried to talk David Geffen into buying Leadbelly’s guitar for him. Mark Lanegan was a Leadbelly fan too. This got me to thinking that most music that can be described as “grunge” resembles, in macrocosm, Leadbelly’s guitar. Leadbelly played a 12 string guitar fingerstyle. With his thumb he would play walking bass lines and brush chords or pick out a melody with his fingers. He played an usually large Stella guitar with a slight longer scale. This allowed him to string it with thicker gauge strings and tune down.


So, you would have this huge guitar sound that roared out octaves and fifths (like power-chords) in the lower register with a comparatively thin singing melody above. Oh, and all tuned down just like Kim Thayil! That’s grunge.


So, that was kind of the standard for a couple of years, good and ill. Around about ‘94 a second wave of truly awful grunge began to infect the airwaves. A grimacing horde of earnest assholes who were the cultural heirs to the corporate rock clowns of the 70s. Weren’t all the music magazines (pre-internet again, kiddies) bleating for their new master and meal ticket, Electronica?


And so into this environment,appears There’s Nothing Wrong With Love.  Very much a guitar rock album but a total breath of fresh air after those angsty, shouty years of grunge. Lyrically wry and lighthearted the album has more traditional guitar harmony with internal 3rds and 6ths instead of all the color riding on top of empty fifths and octaves.
Here’s a killer live version of the opening track, In The Morning,