We are all new wave now. Revivals are usually so self-aware about their style appropriation that their sincerity becomes a trope in and of itself. Fortunately, the ’80s was an absurd enough period that longing for it can’t possibly sustain a whole scene, and so the main crop of new new new-wavers have sufficiently diverse and irregular takes on the music of the post-punk era that the music’s second coming is more like a first assault.
Kenna Zemedkun was born in Ethiopia, near the capital city Addis Ababa. His father was a government minister, and the family lived well. When he was four, they moved to Cincinnati, and the transition was difficult. Then they relocated to Virginia Beach, where two of his friends were a pair of kids called Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, now better known as the Neptunes.
Kenna’s debut album, New Sacred Cow (Flawless/Interscope), is a most faithful revisiting of the ’80s. The vocals are fey and pleading; the synth washes in the background evoke robots making their own music. The songs are exceptionally melodic, with hooks placed wherever there’s space for one. Many of the lyrics allude to breaking free. "Love is medicine for this life," he sings on "Vexed and Glorious," "I wake up late, blame you for fate." He’s at his best on "Freetime," a passionate meditation on escape at all costs: "I leap in my car and ride, ride to oblivion."
What propels Kenna 20 years into the present is the signature punishing percussion of the Neptunes. He produced New Sacred Cow with Hugo, and the scope of the drums sets him apart from his influences, and his peers, adding a musical bravado that makes his wails sound ever more urgent.
Kenna was recently tapped to open for fellow nostalgists No Doubt, as were a fivesome of mildly morbid Midwestern skate brats with a similar fixation on clinical emotion. The Faint didn’t start their musical journey filtering the past though a deranged lens, but as they began to fall in love with the sounds of their machines, any pretensions to indie rock or post-folk fell by the wayside. Danse Macabre (Saddle Creek), their third album, is an almost gothic take on new wave, which certainly had its own share of black-clad, socially awkward whiners.
Whereas Kenna’s songs revolve around longing, desire, and freedom, the Faint are preoccupied with the detritus of industrial society, and more often than not, that includes violence. Over drones and synth blips presumably meant to evoke the mechanization of the workplace, singer Todd Baechle gets Marxist with it: "As I lay to die/The things I think/Did I waste my time?/I think I did . . . the drones work hard before they die." On "Violent," poverty turns to murder: "A girl gets choked/She can’t pay back the loan." The Faint identify with the complaints of the common man. They just take their sympathy to gloomy ends. Even their album cover does so, matching "constructivist" typeface with a still of dancer Mark Morris from One Charming Night — "a dance piece based on a book about vampirism," the liner notes explain.
If the texture of Danse feels a bit, uh, macabre, there’s a reason: the bass player, Dapose, is a refugee from Load, an Omaha death-metal band. So not only are the boys fighting the strictures of new wave in their lyrics, they’re hoping to beat them into unmanly submission with music that sounds like countless torn sheets of metal waving in cacophonous unity. New wave isn’t just for hair-sprayed girly men anymore.
That sentiment was obvious to the post-rock hipsters in DC’s Trans Am long ago. Now on their sixth album, TA (Thrill Jockey), they’ve been playing with the chilly textures of early-’80s new wave for much of the past decade. By this point, all signifiers of authenticity have been obfuscated, and Trans Am have achieved a sound equal parts New Romantic ("Different Kind of Love") and New Statesman ("Cold War"). On the latter, a song about spurned love and geopolitical transformation, a synthetic voice insists, New Order–style, "This war is wrong!" On "Feed on Me," new wave’s commitment to the perfect unity of two souls is sent up as an ode to cannibalism. The past is for dinner, and it’s been fully digested.
