June Of '44 - Louisville's hot June

They made their mark on the American post-rock scene with unpredictable music. And their name, June of 44, still fuels the audience's curiosity. “It seems to us like an interesting period in history,” explains guitarist Jeff Mueller, “and when we chose it we were reading the letters Henry Miller wrote back in 1944.” But what are the roots of this American band that, with its new album “Anahata,” has once again managed to catch everyone off guard?

To find out, we have to start in Louisville, Kentucky. It's here that, towards the end of the previous decade, a group of hardcore musicians began slowing their music down, folding in progressive, jazz and pop elements, giving rise to one of the most important music scenes of the Nineties.

Just as it once seemed incredible that the best rock bands of the first half of the decade all came out of Seattle, today it's hard to keep count of the number of groups coming out of Louisville. But while grunge essentially transplanted the hard rock of twenty years earlier into the '90s (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple etc.), what was happening with the post-rock movement represented a decisive step forward, albeit a less accessible one.

Codeine, creators of a rock in slow motion that critics dubbed "slowcore", Slint, authors of the seminal "Spiderland", and Squirrel Bait were the ones who codified the new genre, followed by a host of imitators. All of the early Louisville post-rock bands, however, broke up quickly, unlike those from Chicago (Tortoise foremost among them), which was destined to become the movement's leading city.

June of 44 belong to the second generation of the Louisville scene, even though the band was partly made up of members of the "old" Codeine and Rodan. Their debut came in 1995 with Engine takes to the water, an excellent album in which the group impresses with its ability to build unpredictable instrumental structures that are always charged with tension. Their main trait lies in their skill at shifting rhythm, expanding and then suddenly compressing their sound.

The following Tropics And Meridians" and the EP Anatomy Of Sharks further boosted their standing in the underground scene.

In 1998, Four Great Points emphasized the melodic elements of their compositions, with a skillful use of trumpet, played by Fredd Erskine, and vocals that no longer simply declaimed lyrics. Meanwhile, all the major figures of the new scene were veering towards a more refined pop sound, abandoning their more adventurous leanings. And June of 44 seemed to be fully in step with the rest of the movement.

But with Anahata came a new turn. It's an album that ventures into difficult territory, in a kind of psychedelic post-rock minimalism. Morricone-esque landscapes, drumming more martial than ever, and vocals that remain subdued, almost listless and off-key, make this a bizarre and alienating work, yet dense with poetry. Almost a return to its roots, then, towards the illuminating, if often difficult, compositions of early post-rock, but at the same time a step forward, one that absorbs the poppier openness of recent years into a sound that's hard to imitate.

After almost twenty years of silence, spurred on by the celebration in Catania of Uzeda's thirty-year career, June of 44 return with an album that revisits the band's past in order to place it within a future perspective: Revisionist: Adaptations And Future Histories In The Time Of Love And Survival. It's about staying true to one's own musical aesthetic and ethic, in which hybridization is an integral part of the creative process, and about channeling the substance of songs regarded as "timeless" into a form capable of breaking free from a specific era and standing as a key to the future for bands that were part of the artistic and cultural landscape of 90s American underground rock.

Thus "REVISIONIST" becomes an intriguing project, conventional in concept yet unusual in outcome, coherent in sound and multifaceted in composition. The album is made up of eight tracks, ideally split into two sides of a vinyl record, introduced by two excellent remixes: at the opening, one by Matmos, and halfway through, one by John McEntire, which represent the "underside" of the band's emotional universe: it's as if the pauses were filled in and the songs' breath taken away, giving vent to a claustrophobia and an underlying anguish never so manifest before in June of 44's music.

Between the two remixes, the previously released songs shed the generic stylistic markers tied to the time in which they were produced – above all emocore or crossover leanings – and return in a guise the band can finally wear comfortably, as with the tracks drawn from Anahata, ReRecorded Syntax and Cardiac Atlas. The latter in particular is the album's most moving moment: full-bodied, dark and restless, today closer in spirit to Swans and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds than to Modest Mouse. Passing through tracks haunted by the ghosts of Girls VS Boys ("Post-Modern Hereditary Steps") and Fugazi ("Generate"), the album closes by looping back, ideally, to its starting point in the temporal short-circuit of "Paint Your Face", a corroded version of "Cut Your Face" recorded by Bob Weston in 1996, before it appeared on Four Great Points, in which the foreboding of an unforgiving future is confirmed as the present: “Time in, and time out again/ Sound in, sound out again/ Overrated stack of zeros/ Stated with indifference”.

As with the Messthetics and Coriky projects, in which the former Fugazi members composed new music with old methods, retaining the same free-spirited attitude of post-hardcore bands, so too June of 44 take hold of their own archive and piece together the constellation of fragments from their past, which gains meaning as a whole thanks also to the consistency of the recording work. The operation is interesting, but it remains hard to fully detach oneself from the fact that you already know most of the songs. "REVISIONIST" does, however, leave us craving an entirely new album from the band, which, given this level of craft, solidity and self-awareness – confirmed by their live dates – we can't wait to hear.

Contributions by Maria Teresa Soldani ("Revisionist: Adaptations And Future Histories In The Time Of Love And Survival")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google